Rabbit
by BunnyRock
Summary: They call me Rabbit... In the wake of the events of Infinity War and the loss of Groot, Rocket Racoon has a mental breakdown. But Thor has a plan to help. If you can't get well: get even. After all, rage and vengeance, anger... Loss, regret: they're all tremendous motivators. They really do clear the mind. And you're never too small or too big for revenge...
1. Chapter 1

**Rabbit.**

They call me Rabbit. That's not my name.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

Thor told them I was called Rabbit. I don't bother to correct him. I'm too tired at first, and by then the name has stuck. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. Besides, I've been called a lot frickin' worse…

 _Vermin, freak, monster, thief, murderer, rodent, thing, 89P13, trash-panda, dad-_

 _(No! that memory is still too painful, I try to push it down, but I can't._

 _… look of fear in his face as he pleads, confused, reaching out to me as I reach back, but his fingers slip away from mine, breaking and crumbling like ash…)_

… and after all, what's in a name? Once I would have got angry if someone got my frickn' name wrong. Once. I doesn't seem important now. Few things do, if I'm being honest.

 _No: just one thing. Only one thing matters. Thor had the right idea, he had a grasp on it, before I even knew I'd feel that need._

I've not been taking care of myself, I know. I was in a pretty deep funk for a while there after… After…

 _(…crumbling like ash, the dust so fine it feels almost silky in my fingers, like baby powder. I can smell it already, and I've been smelling it ever since in the back of my mind. Its bitter, so very bitter, and as he looks at me his face…)_

… after that thing that happened. That no excuse, I know. I'm not the only one. Hell, half the people in the universe know how I feel right now.

The other half? Well, I guess they're not feeling this sort of pain anymore. They're not feeling a whole bunch of anything right now. I've got to give the purple bastard that much, I guess. It was no excuse for getting sloppy. My pain isn't special. It doesn't make me important. It's no excuse to drop the ball.

 _(…and as he looks at me his face, his face cracking up even as I look back at him, I can see his remarkable healing kick in and try to undo the damage, he regenerates as only a plant can._

 _But it's not enough!)_

A lot of people lost someone that day. Some of them couldn't take it, and stepped off the nearest building, even here in Wakanda, where apparently the damage wasn't so severe:

 _Apparently the finger-snap took into account the battle, so those who had lost someone in the fighting were more likely to be saved. Seems weird, there's a logic to this, an underlying thread, but I can't find it. My mind, my remarkable mind, is too shot to hell right now. But if there's something I can use against him, I'll work it out._

I was too weak and broken even for that. I just crawled into bed, stopped eating, and waited to die. I don't think it was a suicide attempt, not exactly I… I just didn't have the energy to keep fighting anymore. It all just hurt too much. I felt empty, hollowed out like there was nothing where my insides should be.

Nothing but that damn dust.

 _(But it's not enough! He crumbles faster that he heals, still trying to reach out to me, pleading. They say The Snap was quick, that people crumbled in a few seconds, and were mostly unaware of what was happening to them. I'm spared even that small mercy. Of course I am. No, I have to watch as Groot's regeneration drags the process out… it couldn't have lasted more than a minute. But you know what they say: an hour chatting with someone you love feels like a minute, a minute with your paw of a hotplate feels like an hour…)_

The other survivors of the battle realize at about day three that I'm not turning up to their little planning sessions, and send someone to fetch me. I think I bite her pretty badly, but those first few days are just a blur of pain. I don't remember.  
They send War Machine the next day, thinking he's not going to worry about a few bites. His armour is surprisingly good, for Terran tech. But it's only Terran: I disable the arc reactor in seconds. Wouldn't have been able to if he'd expected me to fight back, but I'm small, and look weak, and was practically catatonic before he grabbed my tail, and I lash out and catch him unawares. Arc reactors: How quaint. Groot would have loved that, he liked retro tech, like Quill's stupid Walkman or Zune.

 _(a minute with your paw of a hotplate feels like an hour. How long does watching the only person you have left die in front of you feel? All too many people can answer that question now. But how many of them know it's their fault? It's their fault that The Snap happened, that we failed to stop the Purple bastard! That I failed… And that is all I share with the people around me. I hate them for it.)_

Quill… We're still getting mixed reports on what happed on Titan. Nebula is transmitting, but these Terran hicks aren't on any standardized galactic coms-net, and even with Stark working one end and the Wakandan's the other, the signal is still scrambled more often than not. It does however look like Quill screwed the pooch somehow.

I'm not surprised, and I don't blame him, strangely. I have little enough room to blame people who ain't me, and besides, it's in keeping. His response to finding out a god killed his mom was to empty his mag into a fricking _celestial._ With no hesitation. He once went back into a heavily guarded prison to get his Walkman, because it reminds him of his mom. He gave Gamora his O2 mask in space, and got involved in a prison execution to save her, back when he didn't even _know_ her. He apparently once got into a fight because some kids squashed a fog. I guess he just has a thing for green skin.

 _(I hate them for it… but I don't blame them. I blame myself. )_

He leaps before he looks, and that's the worst and the best thing about Quill. He don't plan, not when his friends are involved, he just jumps to your aid, guns blazing, no thought or hesitation. That's what I like about him….

Liked. Liked about him. Right… I keep forgetting. They're all dead. It's funny, how you can be so torn up with grief you occasionally forget something that big. They're all dead. It's just me. I'm the last one. Some Guardians of the Galaxy we turned out to be.

 _(I blame myself… and even in that I'm not special. There are so many "what if's" about Thanos that we all carry at least one. What if we'd stopped Strange and Stark and the others from leaving earth? What if we'd had the battle some place other than Wakanda? What if me and Thor had arrived fifteen minutes earlier? What if he'd swing that axe at his head or his stupid frickin' hand and cut the glove off him? What if they'd let Wanda kill Vision? What if-)_

I'm sorry I never got to meet Wanda. She sounded like a decent person… but that's not it. No, I'm way more messed up than that. It's just… half the universe now knows what it's like to lose someone you love. Countless millions had to watch the person they love most in the world die…. But how many of us poor saps have had to watch the person we love most in the world die _twice?_

If she'd survived we could have made a really fucked up support group. But I guess it's just me. It's always just me…

 _(What if what if what if…. Oh boy, we screwed the pooch. What is a pooch anyway? I wish Quill was here: I don't feel so awkward asking him these things compared to the other Terran's. Strangely, even through all the pain and grief, I still don't want to look stupid in front of the others. Dumb ain't it? The others….)_

I guess if this Stark guy ever gets back, I could ask him to be my support buddy; apparently he was pretty close to this bug-boy, or whatever his name was. Ask him "So hey, what exactly did it feel like for _you_ to have your surrogate son crumble in your arms, helpless to stop it, while he pleaded and you knew it was all your fault? Because it sure sucked for me."

Maybe not. That's a pretty shitty thing to do, even for me.

 _(The others…. We just all have these meetings, about what to do next, and not a single one of those bastards will meet the other's eyes. We all know we screwed up and got half the universe killed. So why have the meeting? To be honest, I think my plan of stay in bed until I die there and rot through the mattress is the smarter option, but that's just my opinion. What does it matter? I close my eyes, and try to ignore them all, but when I do, I just see it all again._

 _… his wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles)_

Thor was the one who finally dragged me out of bed, ignoring teeth and claws and spectacularly bad language, and tossed me into a shower, because I was beyond nasty at that point. He's the one who damned my pain and made me live, who force-fed me as I kicked and screamed and cursed him for not swinging that axe at his frickin' _head,_ and he set his big square heroic jaw and took it, because he wasn't letting me die that easy.

He has a plan, and he needs me.

I look at the parts, scattered over the floor of the hotel suite in Wakanda where they've stashed me because they don't know what to do with me. I look at the weapon parts. This Wakandan junk is primitive as hell… but a lot better that I expected for a backwater dirt-ball like Terra. A lot better. I can work with this, I think, as I start to build a weapon.

 _(… look of fear in his face as he pleads, confused, reaching out to me as I reach back, but his fingers slip away from mine, breaking and crumbling like ash…)_

They call me rabbit. It's not my name. Thor told them I was called Rabbit. I don't bother to correct him. I'm too tired at first, and by then the name has stuck. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters anymore. Besides, I've been called a lot frickin' worse.

I build the weapon, slowly, methodically, using it to calm and organise my mind.

Thor has a plan. Oh, the others do to… but they're trying to find a way to somehow make all this right. They're playing at being _heroes._

Quill was a hero. Gamora and Drax and Mantis too. Groot… Groot had something heroic in him, too. A light in his soul. And maybe, just maybe, towards the end, Rocket was a becoming a bit more of a hero, and a bit less of a professional asshole.

But I'm called Rabbit now. I'm not a Guardian of the Galaxy any more. I ain't guarding jack shit.

I build the weapon, slowly, methodically, using it to calm and organise my mind, and think about Thor's plan. I think about Thor, and what he said, when I was playing captain, and trying to comfort him

 _"The rage and vengeance, anger... Loss, regret, they're all_ _tremendous motivators._ _They really clear the_ _mind, so I'm good to go." Thor said on the way to forge the weapon that spectacularly failed to kill Thanos. Back when I didn't understand his loss._

I once berated Drax for letting grief make him break, and do something stupid. _We've all got dead people! That's no excuse for getting everyone else dead along the way!"_ I said.

I think now that I might have spoken to soon. Getting everyone else dead along the way seems like a fine idea at this point.

 _After all, were already half way there._ I think, putting the finishing touches to the weapon. It's a real peach, a _real_ nasty piece of work.

It's not the only one.

 _(…crumbling like ash, the dust so fine it feels almost silky in my fingers, like baby powder. I can smell it already, and I've been smelling it ever since in the back of my mind. It's bitter, so very bitter, and as he looks at me his face…)_

I glared at Thor, when I realised he seriously wasn't just going to let me waste away, and I decided to hurt him for it.

 _"The rage and vengeance, anger... Loss, regret, they're all tremendous motivators. They really clear the mind, so I'm good to go."_

I looked him dead in the eye, and I said. "Hey, Odinsson." I spat, as he held me in the shower and tried to get the dust out of my grimy fur. I didn't want him too, it was all I had left of Groot. "Blondie, you know what I was doing while you were spectacularly failing to cut that damn glove off, buddy? Having a nice little chat with Groot while he melted away to dust, and you know what we talked about, big guy, you wanna frickin' know what his last words were?" I yelled, screaming and spitting, tears mixing with the water. "He said _I am Groot!"_

I get the infection exactly right, and Thor flinches, like he's been slapped. Oh yeah, pretty boy, you're regretting taking that optional extra-credit course to learn to speak Groot now, aint ya? Because him and me are the only two people left in the universe who can understand what I just said.

 _(…and as he looks at me his face, his face cracking up even as I look back at him, I can see his remarkable healing kick in and try to undo the damage, he regenerates as only a plant can._

 _But it's not enough! He crumbles faster that he heals, still trying to reach out to me, pleading. They say The Snap was quick, that people crumbled in a few seconds, and were mostly unaware of what was happening to them. I'm spared even that small mercy. Of course I am. No, I have to watch as Groot's regeneration drags the process out… it couldn't have lasted more than a minute. But you know what they say: an hour chatting with someone you love feels like a minute, a minute with your paw of a hotplate feels like an hour…_

 _And he looks me in the eye, as I reach for him and can't get a hold of him, and he askes, pleadingly "Dad?"_

 _And then he's gone.)_

Thor, holding me down me in that hotel shower while I bite and kick and scratch him, winces, and then, to my surprise and rage, hugs me. I fight harder, but there's no getting out of it. He's too strong. Eventually, the fight goes out of me. I just want to die, and I sob and sob and I just can't stop.

"It's okay, Rabbit… it's okay. We…. We failed. You're right to blame me. The others say we shouldn't blame ourselves: that we should put all our blame on Thanos. But that seems very selfish, to me, Rabbit. He's already taken everything else, from us, why should we give him that as well?"

I snarl.

"I want to kill him." I mutter into my own sodden fur.

Thor smiles. "You know, with all the others trying to find some sort of plan to somehow undo this, or make it right, or help the half of a galaxy left behind, I think you're the only one out of them who has actually just come out with it and said that. They are all trying to be noble and constructive about this, for some reason."

I remember snorting back laughter. "Fuck that" I think. Apparently I said that out loud, because Thor laughs grimly.

"Yes. The rage and vengeance, anger... Loss, regret, they're all tremendous motivators. They really do clear the mind, so I'm good to go, if you are."

I peal myself way from his shoulder long enough to give him the stink eye.

"Go? Go where?" I ask. I look like a drowned rat. He don't look to much better. I wonder when he last slept.

"Wherever Thanos is." He says. And after a moment, I grin.

I'm grinning now, as I put the final piece into the weapon, and it hums to life.

Rocket, Guardian of the galaxy, was a hero. Thor, prince of Asgard was a hero. But Asgard is gone. The Guardians are gone, and my name is Rabbit.

If the others want to try and pick up the broken pieces, good for them. Thor and Rabbit, we have other plans.

I didn't know what a rabbit was, so when I got the chance I googled it. There are apparently two meanings: a small fluffy animal that everyone thinks is harmless, and the Irish Gaelic word for dangerous. I'm okay with those two terms.

Let the heroes be heroes, but personally, we tried that, and it didn't work out so well for half of the universe. I'm trying out a different option.

Because we failed to save our friends. I failed to save Groot, my adoptive son. We didn't save the day. The bad guy won.

So what?

Just because we couldn't protect the earth doesn't mean we can't damn well Avenge it.

 _(Dad!?)  
_  
And this time, we _will_ be aiming for the head.


	2. Chapter 2: The Hard Bit

**Chapter two: the hard bit**

So if you're reading this, you probably know more about my revenge than I do.

I have no plan to share this log with anyone. Scratch that: I have no plan. I'm just using my bionics to log memories in an attempt to get my head straight. Basically, just talking to myself. So if you've got this I've either had an uncharacteristic change of heart when it comes to opening up to others, or I'm dead and you're rooting around in the wetware-hardware interface of my brain in which case good luck, pal, because I have a whole _bunch_ of communicable diseases, including some interesting abnormal prions you're going to get to know real well real soon scumbag. Wash your hands, is what I'm saying.

But let's assume it's the change of heart option; that I'm opening up rather than being opened up. Unlikely, I know, but what about this ain't? My name is frickin' Rabbit now. I'm sitting so close to an Asgardian thunder god I can feel his body heat and the static coming off him is making my fur stand on end. None of this makes sense.

So let's assume you've already seen the highlights of my Roaring Rampage of Revenge. The great Wakandan quin-jet heist, the panicked flight to the stars, the brawling, the king of Sakaar, the fight in the grand arena… all that crazy violent insane fighting we went thought just to put an axe back in Thor's hand, to get us to where we are now, in an actual position to strike back at Thanos. The mountains of corpses, rives of blood and the best con I've even seen pulled?

That, that was the easy bit.

The _hard bit_ was getting the fuck out of bed that first day. And the second day, and the day after that.

You know how this starts. The battle of Wakanda. The purple guy. The Snap.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

That's not how it starts for me. That's how It ends for Rocket. He dies with Groot, lucky bastard. Rabbit… Rabbit is born dog tired, hurting and with all of Rocket's memories and with the dust that was Groot in his fur, sitting on a log and staring into space in a clearing in the Wakandan veldt while a whole bunch of dangerous people in stupid outfits try to work out what just went wrong.

This is where it starts for Rabbit. This is the hard bit…

Warmachine asks what the hell is going on, loudly, and at length. He is angry. Enraged, in fact. Everyone around me is running through the five stages of grief at their own speeds, a very personal arithmetic of pain and loss. Most look stunned, in the denial stage, I vaguely think. Warmachine there is on Anger. Soon someone will go onto bargaining.

They're children, I realise. Almost all of them. They went into this thinking they could win. Well, so did Rocket… but Rocket is used to losing more often than winning. He's knows to expect the kick in the teeth. I try, desperately, to cling to the denial, anger and negotiation stages of grief because they give me a sense of power, or the ability to pretend this isn't happening or pretend I could trade my mangy pelt for Groot's life, but they slip away from me in seconds, and the acceptance stage never comes. There is just a void. A horrifying void of feeling and meaning. Ash, that grey dust. It's us now. We're the real victims of the snap. We're the living dead: they just don't all realise it yet.

I want to throw up quite badly now, I realise.

Warmachine still hasn't shut up, and I'm regretting dropping my gun somewhere because I'd quite like to shoot him, or myself, or everyone, starting, irrationally, with me. Anything to shut him up, and end that pain, that void of feeling. The Blond Terran with the Thor beard who was fighting with the pointy shield on each arm, the one they call Cap, is the first to respond. To break out of that funk, and actually do something. I watch him. He doesn't notice me. Few do. I watch his eyes. He's not a child, he's dealt with real loss before, and he directs it better that the others. Better than me, If I'm honest.

"Natasha, call for extraction. Link up with the Wakandan's and get us transport back to the city. Open lines of communication to the US and the UN, find out if this is local or global. Get someone to find director Fury, we'll need his intel, and in the short term direct the surviving Wakandan's back to the city and get the shields back up. We'll have a lot of frightened and confused civilians to deal with. General, go with agent Romanov."

The female Terran with the hair nods, and moves to obey. I can see in her eyes she's the only one other than Cap who's coping at all. She has hard eyes, like Gamora. There's a story there, but I'm too tired and broken to care to hear it. The bald Terran female, the Wakandan, is string into space _tharn_ and pumping out so much adrenaline and cortisol I want to spit to get the taste of it out of my mouth. Stars! And I thought it was bad with just Quill. I'm now on a planet crawling with terrans. I'll never get the smell out of my fur.

Romanov takes the bald one by the shoulder, as Cap says "General!" slightly sharply, and she responds to the tone of his voice if not his words. That's why the military drills you till you're falling over tired, boys and girls: so when you're too broken to know what's what, you'll still respond to a drill-sergeant tone of voice and do what needs doing on autopilot.

As the general is lead away, Cap turns to look over the others, assaying us, seeing who's functioning and who's truly broken. His scent is odd, his metabolism is running far hotter than a standard Terran, like they set all the option sliders to max when building him, but unlike Quill there's not that hint of the alien about him. There's also not a hint of junk food and a lacklustre attitude to laundry days. I plan to tell Quill about it, to mock him, not yet knowing that he's screwed the pooch and died, in that order. Classic Quill.

I'll feel guilty when I hear about that, think that I should have been there to look out for him and stop him doing something more than ordinarily stupid, but right now, I've got bits of Groot stuck in my fur. There's no room to feel anything else or think about anyone else.

Cap's gaze sweeps over me, and I know that look. I've given it myself on more than one battle field. He's triaging us; who's okay, who can be fixed with work, who's a lost cause and needs to be left in order to focus energy on the ones who can be helped right now. This is normally done with physical injury, but given the general level of shock floating about right now, it's a good plan.

Only him and Natasha are what you'd call functional right now. Most of the rest, from shouty McShoutyface Warmachine who's now negotiating with the others about this, to confused looking guy in the remains of a mec-suit who's looking a little green about the gills, go into the second category. They're not good, but with prodding they'll be okay.

I get a slightly confused raised eyebrow from him, and go into the third category without hesitation.

Warmachine punches the ground, and cap goes to deal with him. He's not a happy bunny. Well, neither am I, but I can see the poor guy's world view breaking as I watch, numb. This is a guy who thought he could win. _Would_ win. This comes as a shock to him.

I assume, at the time, that this tantrum is because he's not suffered loss before. I'm wrong. I later learn that Warmachine was paralyzed and almost killed on a previous mission, and only saved by experimental treatments developed by this Stark guy. I also learn, insanely, that many humans have prejudices regarding skin colour of all things, and that to reach his respected position in the military he had to overcome all sorts of adversity-

 _Interestingly if you care, I don't even twig the difference in colour of these guys at first. Not because I'm Enlighted and un-prejudiced. Quite the opposite, I'm gonna make every racially insensitive jokes about you dumb hummie bald-bodes I can. I just don't see colour too well. My main senses are scent and touch, and while I **can** see colours, except for red which I'm pretty sure Quill was making up, my vision is more attuned to movement and silhouette. I recognise people by scent, movement patterns, shape and the cadence of their breathing. That's it. Sorry, but none of you are actually that interesting to look at, you're all just smelly blobs to me. _

-but this, I see this snap something in him. He probably went into this feeling that on some level it would work out. That the good guys would triumph. That the world was, when you got down to it, fair.

Nothing is worse that thinking the world is fair. Not only is it a falsehood, It's a dangerous one. Because if the world is in any way fair, then bad things can't happen to good people, can they? So it logically follows that if something really crappy happens to you, you somehow deserved it. Got sick? It's because you didn't live entirely on super-food smoothies like me. Born with no legs? Did something bad in a past life. Poor? You must be lazy. Got raped? Shouldn't have gone out dressed like that. Got your ass kicked by a big purple dude who killed half the universe? Should have eaten your greens young man. Thinking that the world is fair is comforting, so long as it works, but it's also the pre-requisite for all victim shaming, and more pertinently right now, it's a hell of a though day when you lose that worldview. This was his big come-back after being paralysed: the third act of the story where the plucky underdog overcomes his adversity and wins. Would have won, in a just world. Instead, he struggled, fought hard, suffered loss and hardship, overcame adversity with the help of his friends and, in the final climatic fight, he _still_ lost. Lost _hilariously_ easily, we got curbstomped. I see that belief in a just world, in a world where the good guys win _because_ they're good die in Warmachine then and there, and I actually envy the fucker.

He gets to feel something other than this.

Cap scoops him up, shouts at him a bit, and gets him to fly off, checking the perimeter for any hostiles we've missed, but the fact is between the Wakandan's, these guys, and Thor's arrival, most of the hostiles were toast before The Snap. Most: only the big purple guy mattered, and he knew it. Cap then starts to organise the walking wounded, loading them onto Wakandan hover-craft and getting them back to the city. I see Thor glowering into the distance as he steps on, but it's Cap that actually remembers I'm here sitting on this log and sends Thor back for me. I'm too fucked up at this point to speak. I'm basically catatonic. I want to vomit and hyperventilate at the same time, but can't. I don't want to leave this place, I want to mark the exact spot where Groot fell, somehow, so I can find It again, but I can't make the words come out so Thor just takes me by the hand and leads me off to the Hover-craft and I struggle and point, and grunt and stare at the spot where he fell.

And then the door of the hover-craft closes, and I'm too short to see over that rail, and I realise I'll never see that place, or Groot, again.

I faint.

* * *

I don't remember much of what happened next.

I know I convinced them that I need rest, and that I'm not physically injured, and, probably because they don't have any clue how my biology works as it is, they dump me in a fancy hotel suite and leave me be.

Apparently. I have no memory of this. I just recall flashing back again and again to Groot's death, and then the room.

There are two guards outside the door. If I was thinking rationally I'd have realised they are here to help, and as a mark of respect, and they're not my jailers. But I was born in a lab, proprietary wetware held against my will and experimented on, and I've been in lock-up too many times to see it that way. In my mind, the presence of guards instantly makes this my cell.

I'm too broken to care. And, in all honesty, it is the nicest prison cell I'd ever been in, something I singularly fail to notice until after I've comprehensively trashed it.

It has a bed. At this point that's all I care about.

I crawl into a bed designed to comfortably fit two tall terrans and, presumably, all their friends and extended families. It's, frankly, ridiculous. I need to knock over a cabinet and then drag over the coffee table from the sitting area just to build a ladder so I can climb up onto it, and once I'm in there I can barely see out. This bed doesn't have an edge, it has a fucking horizon. I worry that I'm not going to be able to get a GPS signal to find my way out again.

Not that I plan to get out again. Not really.

I make a nest out of pillows and blankets somewhere in the upper latitudes of the bed. Not only is the bed huge, it's covered with so many pillows and comforters I can't find the frickin' mattress. I find a pillow the approximate same size as me, and drag it into the cave I've built like it's my prey. Once I've got in in there I spoon it, wrapping all four limbs and my tail around it and hugging it as tightly as I can, eyes screwed shut.

The tremors come before the tears.

The shaking wracks me. I shiver and shudder, hissing with physical pain. You know that ache you get deep in your stomach, during intense emotional upset? That's your vegus nerve: if you're that sad, your body can't process it, it decides that if you're feeling _that_ bad, you must be physically injured somewhere and it can't detect the site of the damage, so it assigns the pain to a nerve hidden deep inside you. Something internal and hard to define, a catch-all nerve of general pain and grief.

The vegus nerve also works on something called the sympathetic nervous system, which is a bad joke because I'm not feeling a whole lot of sympathy right now as I bite the pillow to stop myself from screaming. Whenever they built me In that lab, I think they must have messed up my Vegas nerve worse than usual, because while the ache is strongest in the pit of my stomach, forcing me to curl up into a ball around it like I've been gut-punched, it also sends waves of sharp, sweeping pain from my ears to my tail like a relay race, with a secondary dull ache in my balls and asshole, for some reason, as well as itchy palms and footpaws. I think the endocrinal imbalance from all this grief has inflamed my scent glands. Trash panda problems, am I right?

My body temperature spikes, but I can't stop shivering. In the dark of my nest, I become hyper aware of the scents of my own body and the sounds of the hotel room: a dripping noise somewhere nearby, a mechanical whirring noise, a high, pained whimpering.

Wait. I think that last one is actually me.

Now the crying starts, and oh boy, it does not want to stop. I practicality drown. Seriously: I soak the pillow weeping and drooling into it, I have a tendency to gnaw on things when I'm sad, and then, mid-way thought a particularly harrowing wail, I accidentally inhale the sodden pillowcase, neatly and effectively blocking my windpipe. In my grief, I've somehow managed to waterbord myself by mistake. Fuck my life.

Gagging and choking, I fix it, and then resume weeping. I pretty soon realise I should have just let pillow choke me: not content with torturing me, that stupid vegus nerve takes over you breathing if you pass out, which is why you can't kill yourself just by holding your breath. I wrap around the pillow tighter, badly deforming it as I sob into it. I want this to just _end_ already.

I cry myself to sleep.

The nightmares come hard and fast. Groot's face melting into dust as I watch, helpless, and I wake to realise that the nightmares are real.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

I wake screaming, mostly from the dreams, but also because I've sunk into memory foam and tangled my feet in a comforter and lost all circulation in my legs and it's agony. I manage to fight my way out of my sleep-cavern, dragging my pillow with me because I don't abandon my booty, and strike out in an random direction and manage to fall off the edge of the bed and onto my face before the mattress can try to eat me again.

Picking myself up, I look around bleary eyed.

It's light. I don't know if its same day of if I've slept the clock around. I don't care. I need something to stop the dreams. I scan the room. No decanter or visible booze. Who puts a vase of flower in a room, but no whiskey? Savages.

I stagger to the door. The handle is out of reach, so I bang on it. After a moment a Wakandan guard opens it. She pears downs at me. I can see she's been crying. Join the frickin' club, pal. We have a really snotty and tear-stained pillow-fort.

I realise I don't speak Wakandan, and for some reason it's not in the database of Terran languages in my translator, so I try the one Quill spoke.

"Drink." I say, in English.

She looks to the other guard, confused. "Do, you need us to show you how to use the taps? I can get you a glass of water." she says, in accented but perfectly good English. "Do you need me to show you to the bathroom?"

It's a bathroom, moron, I've been able to smell where it is since I walked into the suite. But I don't want to make an enemy of my jailer, so I sugar coat my words.

"I don't need to use the bathroom. I piss on your frickin' bathroom-"

"That's… that's not quite how you're meant to use it-"

"I don't need the bathroom, I need a drink."

"I'll get you a bottle of water, little warrior."

"I don't drink water: fish fuck in it." I inform her. "Do you have whiskey on this planet, or do you still lick frogs for fun?"

She looks offended, although my question about the frogs was serious, that's not a bad way to spend an afternoon. She does, however, answer politely.

"There is a minibar in your room. By the-"

"Thanks." I say, closing the door on her. This is my room, not hers, and I want to keep it that way.

I scan the room again. Mini-bar? There's nothing in there that looks like a bar, small or otherwise. If it was a min bar, shouldn't there be tiny people throwing up in front of it and fighting the mini bouncer?

I scan the room further, ears twitching and nose sniffing. I can't smell booze, must be sealed containers. Fruit, flowers, racoon saliva and damp cotton from my pillow, Freon, wool from the carpet-

Freon?

I focus on the mechanical humming sound I can hear, from one of the cabinets. Surely these hicks have invented solid-state refrigeration? They can't probably still be using mechanical refrigerators?

I run to the cabinet, dragging grief-pillow. I'm getting a bit desperate now. I can feel the shakes coming again, hear Groot's voice in my mind….

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

I pull open the cabinet.

Jackpot.

Oh, it's called the mini bar because the bottles are tiny. Okay, I get that now.

Damn inconvenient because it means I have to pop open two frickin' bottles to even get a good drink, so my first swig is two different malt's at once, one in each paw, down the hatch, at least one of them too good a malt to be treated like that, but I can feel the darkness coming and I can't face those dreams sober. If I drink enough, it'll disrupt REM sleep and I won't dream. Next up is a mix of bourbon and some sort of brandy, and then I make a start on the white spirits before my stomach reminds me that it was aching already, and protests its current treatment violently. The malt burns more and tastes worse coming back up, but I'm beyond caring. I lean to one side, vomit on the carpet for a minute straight, wrenching and gagging myself empty, and when I sure I'm done, I finish off the half empty gin and vodka bottles I had just started. I decide my stomach might need something to line it, to protect it from the neat spirits, so I finish the beer and tiny bottles of wine first, and then the final spirits. I haven't eaten since I left the Guardians, at least twenty-four hours ago. My head is swimming.

I grab the now slightly soiled Greif-pillow, and drag myself back to bed, and pass out. I do not dream, and that's the best feeling in the universe right now.

It doesn't last.

Sleep and wakefulness become indistinguishable blurs of pain. Sleep is a nightmare and when I'm awake I'm wracked by fits of crying and that ache in my vegus nerve. It's so strong and my haze of grief so total, I can't distinguish between it and other aches, so I don't even notice that I need the bathroom until I feel my thighs go wet. Perhaps the beer was a mistake. I fall asleep again.

It is in this salubrious state that I start to attract visitors.

I remember little of this, as I've said. But I can reconstruct some of it.

Now, I'm a light sleeper. Very. And also, the heaviest you'll ever meet: I have in the past slept through earthquakes, fires, artillery barrages, and Drax's snoring. I've shared a ship with Quill as he's yielded whatever was left of his virtue to Gamora, and while I can't say I slept though all of that horror show, there's nothing that will make you keenly fake sleeping and pretend you're not there like sharing a spaceship with thin, non-soundproofed walls and two people suddenly overcoming a year and a bit of belligerent sexual tension all at once. And one of them's a super strong cyborg assassin, I mean, I was amazed we had bulkheads left come morning. Or Quill, for that matter.

So I can sleep through loud, that I can do, no problem. What I can't sleep through, though, is quiet, directed or purposeful noise, none of which describes Quill's lovemaking. No, after a full third of my life in prison, a full-on battle thirty feet away won't wake me, but some big bad SOB breathing where they shouldn't ten feet away from me will. Truth is, I don't exactly sleep. I nap. I enter REM sleep in which I retain muscular control and rest _parts_ of my brain, followed by unihemispheric slow wave sleep where I rest half my brain at a time, and have very short, very light episodes of deep sleep to sync up the two halves of my brain scattered in that. And no, that's not a racoon thing, that's an experimental combat cyborg thing, you insensitive jerk.

Downside: my circadian rhythm is shot to hell because they did a piss poor job at syncing up my neural architecture with my endocrinal systems because, spoiler alert, I'm only In beta and I escaped before they could get all of the undesirable bugs like spitting and swearing and free will out of my system, so I'm riddled with everything from indigestion and sub-optimal bladder capacity to a barrage of sleeping problems. Micro-sleep parasomnia sometimes, severe insomnia the rest of the time, and a real bad case of hating mourning all the time, with a side orders of sleep paralysis so intense that as I child I named the hunched demonic figure I saw leaning over me in my habitat each night because I didn't have any other friends.

Plus side: I'm basically in REM sleep 90% of my sleep, which is bad if you're trying to avoid dreams about your tree-son's face melting into dust, or Mister Cuddles the rapey sleep paralysis daemon, but means that you can actually maintain muscular control, and a degree of for-planning while technically still asleep. You ever sleepwalked, or you ever punched kicked or yelled in a dream? Okay so most people have. You ever grabbed a phone, or alarm, or other object and moved it when you were just waking up and sworn afterwards that you were still asleep when you did it? You probably were. You can still make rudimentary movements and even complete moderately complex tasks from muscle-memory alone while still in REM sleep. If I'd had enough booze to disrupt REM and stop the dreams for more than a few hours, this wouldn't have happened. The moral of the story there, boys and girls: stock the mini-bar way, way better.

So while I was technically asleep in the garbage-pile of a nest I'd built for myself, with all the brain modifications I've had, and after years of being trained in the gladiator school that is bad prisons on a dozen crappy worlds where someone approaching you when your sleep is definitely going to try and stick _something_ into you, most likely a shank, I can't say I was 100% unaware when the door unlocked. Part of me, the part of me that thinks of every room I've ever slept in as being my current cell, was waiting for this. And while most of me was dealing with… unpleasantness…

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face…. Oh gods, when will these dreams ever stop?)_

… at least five percent of me was wide awake when the door opened.

That five percent of me can't be trusted. He's a dickhole. He makes bad decisions. He always thinks he's in prison and just wants to fight stuff. I don't like the guy I am when you interrupt my REM cycle.

True, I don't particularly like who I am the rest of the time either, but at least awake me is interesting company.

I was asleep. There was probably some swearing, in a language I don't understand: one of the Wakandan ones because they are such a secretive bunch that even other terrans don't know jack shit about them, so how the hell is a standard galactic translator meant to have it on the pre-set language options? It was 100% swearing, though. You can't mistake swearing, even if you don't speak it.

In hindsight, she was probably entering my room because I hadn't come out for food in days, and thus demonstrating a level of concern for I me I feel kind of bad for betraying. As for why she swore, well, at this stage there may or may not have been a puddle of vomit by the min-bar, a burnt out motor on the mini bar and/or a small electrical fire because I forgot to shut the fridge door behind me and I forgot that you frickin' Terran hicks still use refrigerators with moving motors in them as opposed to unbreakable solid state refrigerators, so it broke. Also, once you're too depressed to get out of bed to pee the _first_ time there's kinda no going back from there on, so the room might have had a notable odour of racoon urine at the time.

Yeah, now I think about it, I can totally see why she swore, and then ran to the bed to check if I was okay.

Bad move.

I have no memory of biting the guard. I just remember waking up frickin' terrified, and my jaws were already clamped on someone's wrist, grinding into their bone. Given a lifetime of very poor life choices, this is not entirely unusual for me. But for once it wasn't Quill, and as soon as I realised that, I panicked and bit deeper. If you wake up mid fight with no idea how you got into the fight _win the fucking fight first,_ **then** and only then work out what the hell you're fighting over, because if the answer is "Your kidneys" and you stopped half way to ask, joke's on you kiddo.

So I chomp down until I feel my jaws meet. Whilst this is happening, just in case any of you are imagining this fight as dignified, the guard, she's hollering and screaming and waving her arm around, and because I'm about a quarter of her weight, if that, I get slammed into the bed, the window, the ceiling, and the bed again in a rapid cycle as she tries to shake me off. In her defence, she's not a bad fighter, and I see her take a deep breath and compose herself even as I'm trying to claw her eyes out, and she grits her teeth and calmly puts a fist in my balls with a power and precision that even Gamora would be proud of. A little too low to fracture my baculum and drive the shards down into my scrotum, which a more knowledge opponent would have aimed to do, but still a ten out of ten for effort. A real eye-waterer.

I loosen my grip on her wrist with my teeth, and let the momentum from her punch spin me around her arm like a gymnast on parallel bars, and kick her in the face with both feet. I then lock both my legs around her throat, let go of her wrist, stuff my tail in her face so she can't see and I make a good go at biting her face when the other guard hits me from behind with a spear-haft. It's got some sort of Taser hidden in it and also they get me _hard_ right over the kidney, and I spasm and drop like a sack of shit before my bionics compensate, and I'm up and scabbing spider-like across the floor towards them Linda Blair style. Yeah, I've seen old terran moves with Quill, and so I snarl and milk the horror-show as much as I can as a charge at their ankles, chittering an howling demonically like head spinning is a real option if I catch up with them, to try an freak them out, give me the advantage.

The frickin' cowards just lock the door on me. I'm there with my balls aching fit to burst, on all floors hissing like a kettle, but I can't reach the damn handle and I can tell that they're both holding onto the handle and leaning back, so even If I could reach it, which I can't, and even if I had a key-card, which I don't, there no way I could physically pull the door inward with both of them pulling on the other side.

So I do the grown up thing and shout rude names under the door at them for about half an hour, before I excuse myself and head to the bathroom to check my undercarriage for any sign of physical damage, although if I'm honest it's the most action I've had in that area for some time. I also force myself to urinate to make sure that the blow to my kidney won't make me piss blood.

The toilet is, of course, way too tall for me to stand in front of or actually sit comfortably on, and given I have a sheath and penis bone down there it's not like I can actually aim any, but relative to my size, the toilet is like a full bathtub for me, so I don't exactly need to aim, I just stand on the edge, check that I'm not peeing red, and gingerly check that my scrotum hasn't actually been forced back into my body by the force of the punch.

I'm joking here: a far more likely outcome would be testicular rupture on one side; it's kinda hard to burst both grapes with a single blow, one tends to move to the side and get out okay unless you grab in a palm and squeeze. Gamora can rupture both with a kick, but it took her literally hundreds of hours of training to get the technique down, and I never had the patience or, frankly, long legs to learn it from her. There didn't seem any point when most people's junk were at teeth height for me anyway. Thankfully, my assailant is less expert in ball-busting than I am, and I make it out of this with no more that agonising bruising.

I'm actually enjoying this, I realise. This is the first new pain I've felt in days. For a moment, it distracts me from the real pain.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

I shudder.

I tell the toilet to flush, but it ignores me. Maybe it only speaks Wakandan. A bigger problem is the faucet. I need water: that fight has made me realise how thirsty I am.

I find a glass in the main room of the suite, and, walking bow legged and wincing, make my way to the bathroom and agonisingly climb up high enough on a small trashcan to hold it under a tap. While I make it a point to never drink water, because on an occupied planet it's all been pee at least once before, and somewhere as primitive as terra it probably comes out of the taps opaque, I somehow suspect I've lost my mini-bar privileges, and at this stage dysentery seems the better option to thirst.

"On." I tell the tap.

The little fucker disobeys me. Bastard.

"Run. Flow." I tell it. Still nothing. This little shit has a death wish, I realise. Doesn't it know I killed the fridge for less?

"Oh come on" I tell it. I pause. This is a fancy hotel: they might have more than just water on tap. I have no idea what liquids might be piped in somewhere this posh. Maybe I need to specify what liquid, and that why it won't work.

"Whiskey?" I ask, more in hope than expectation. "Beer, Soda, caffeine, wine, tea: I'll even settle for herbal. Milk? Water? Water, warm, water, cold. Ice. Snow. Frickin' mist, I'll lick the condensation off the mirror I I have to…. Oh fuck you taps." I say, squinting at them suspiciously.

I'm being an idiot, I realise.

This is a _really_ fancy hotel: they'll have those new telepathic taps that respond to your thoughts, like at Nova corp. HQ.

I spend a full five minutes visualising a running mountain brook of clean, cool, fast flowing water, but that just makes me need to pee again. The taps, stuck up bastards that they are, still refuse to help. I lose my temper with them, and punch them.

Holy shit! They turn on if you knock that thingy-ma-bob from side to side.

Oh god, I'm in the fucking stone-ages: they don't even have telepathic taps. Clearly, Quill is actually quite high functioning by the standards of these backwoods savages, I think as carry my water back to my nest and try to find the least nasty location to bed down. I decide on a combination of Grief-pillow and the blankets that are only slightly crusty with snot and tears, and hunker down in nest Mrk 2, hoping against hope that the guards will come in and fight me again.

They don't and the agony in my back and balls isn't strong enough to keep the greater pain at bay. Despite myself, hating myself, I slip back into the sleep-not-sleep cycle of grief.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

War-machine attacking me early the next day is a brief but welcome distraction.

Unlike the previous incursion where I was asleep and operating on autopilot up until after I had bit down, I hear Warmachine coming a good way off. Given that I bit someone, heavy armour that's impervious to biting was probably a good call on paper, but it's too heavy for him to take the elevator and I'm on the twentieth floor because hotels always put the fanciest rooms near the top so the filthy normies at street level can't gawp at you bein' all rich and stuff. Annoying, because being the good class-conscious citizen I am I always make a point to rob rom the rich 'cause they have the best stuff most worth stealing, and all the pleb-proofing hotels do is a gigantic pain in my ass when I want to rob them. You think I like crawling though air vents? They're all hot and dusty, it sets of my allergies. Don't even get me started on hiding inside the room-service carts, it always gives you cramp.

Anyway armour of not, he's not taking those stairs if he doesn't have to, so they wedge open a window in the corridor outside my room and fly him in. Repulsors are quieter than jet engines, but only just. Forget Thanos, I've got a feeling that this Stark guy's long tern arch-enemy is going to be tinnitus, because this sounds like a blender fellating a fire-extinguisher. It physically shakes my windows, and a can feel the _clang_ of him landing on the marble floor of the corridor like a funeral bell. Bugger me, talk about a rude awakening.

I still don't get out of bed. I'm too busy dealing with my own daemons here, and weird as it it to say, a guy whose name is literally War Machine doesn't seem like the biggest problem in my life at this moment. I'm in a bad way, shivering, shaking, crying, starting to burn up with fever because I've not exactly sanitary right now and I think I've caught something, so I just groan, and bury my head further into the pillow, hoping that he'll just go away on his own.

He doesn't. I hear him enter, swear, like he's never seen a wrecked hotel room before, and then call out. He's talking in a soft voice, like the kind you use for children, animals and folk standing on a ledge, and it irks me more than if he'd just stormed in guns blazing. I resolve to give him the silent treatment. Also, after all the crying I'm not sure if I can actually talk or I've I've lost my voice at this stage. I hunker down and screw my eyes shut, and as I do I see it again.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

Some fucker grabs my tail.

My god-dammed _tail._

You have any idea how many nerve endings are in my tail? That's a very intimate place for me. You pull on it, it sends pressure all along my spine right the way up to my skull, and it also causes considerable pain in the whole butt-thighs-and-pelvis area. I don't even let my _friends_ touch my tail because you've got to have some boundaries or stuff gets creepy. It's basically an erogenous zone. And some fucker clearly wants to pull it out by the root given how hard he's just grabbed it.

I lose my shit.

Cool armour or not, he clearly cant see good with a pillow rammed over his helmet, and while there is a brief "What the fu-" from under the pillow, I spot the glow of the arc-reactor and quickly tap the plate holding it in place. My claws have specialised nerve ending at the base that measure turning moment, I can get a _really_ good idea how strong or how loose something is with claws alone, and my fingers themselves are even better. I feel the armoured glass cover-plate shift, it's screwed directly into the cuirass of the armour. I lick my fingers as Warmachine waves a wrist mounted gun around and machine-guns my ceiling, raining plaster everywhere as he staggers back blind, and as the callus on my paws instantly softens in the wet, I grab the glass cover and give it a sharp quarter turn to the left. It pops out in my hand. Warmachine steps backwards onto some sort of futon or couch, crushing it and falling over into the now burnt out mini-bar starting a second small electrical fire that fizzles out in seconds. I shove my other nimble little paw into the hole, and grab the earth wire that links the inner iridium ring to the outer casing, and pull.

There is a _pop_ and the wire and the meal ring fly across the room and get lost somewhere under my bed. Instantly, the armour powers down and freezes up leaving war machine frozen in place. I chitter once at face height, for good measure, rub my ankle gland on the armour to claim it as mine, and and then go back to bed. There is swearing for some time, but I ignore it.

In hindsight, if I'd known that that arc-reactor had also powered his prosthetics, including the fibre-optic implant that bridged his spine and let him feel his legs, I would have probably left it in. I'm not a complete asshole. As it is, he curses me out for a while, and eventually the guards on the door summon the courage to enter and drag him out, suit and all. What the hell? I ankle-claimed that suit! If you hicks don't respect the ankle gland I'm going to have to move up to the big guns of scent marking, and take it on trust no one, including me, wants that. Weirdos.

Thankfully, after that there are no more rude interruptions. Trays of food and glasses of water appear and disappear, but no one dares tries to touch me so I tolerate this invasion. I drink some water, but I can't face food at first, and later once I enter starvation mode the smell of it is just too rich for me, almost nauseating. I ignore it, and every day the tray leaves untouched. Eventually a medic starts observing from the doorway, probably wondering how long before I'm weak enough for him to kidnap and vivisect me. Jokes on him: I plan to die first.

Finally, I'm just left alone to waste away like I want.

Until Thor Odinsson of course turns up and ruins my entire week.

Actually, Make that life.

The first Guard, I slept thought them entering my room. Warmachine, I ignored. Thor takes the initiative and make sure neither of those are an option and announces his presence by kicking the door in.

As in, _fully_ in. He doesn't just kick it open, or even knock it down flat: the front door of the suite flies across the living area and slams in to the wall of the bathroom so hard the doorknob gets embedded fist deep in the concrete. The tropical hardwood disintegrates sending splinters flying across the room like shrapnel. Whoever payed for this suite, they ain't getting their deposit back.

I'm up and armed in under a second, because no-one who enters a room like that is interested in your opinions or wants to talk it over politely. This isn't like the guard or Warmachine, this guy isn't messing around, I realise as wake from a pleasant little dream about Groot's death, and before I realise it I've grabbed my glass of water and shattered the rim against the bedside table and I'm standing in my best bar-fight pose: footpaws wide, tail balancing, bodyweight held low, heavy base of the glass in my palm to smack heads, jagged edge of the broken glass pointed down ice-pick style, teeth bared and claws extended on off-hand. I'm awake, pissed as hell, and ready for anything.

And then an actual god walks in, every bit as pissed off as I am, sparks crackling of his knuckles and earthing themselves in the door frame as he powers through, and I can see it in his eyes he's in no mood to take shit.

My eyes go wide, and I swear. "Oh Crap!" I say, panicking and throwing the glass. I am totally not ready for this.

The glass shatters off his face, drawing a little blood on his right temple but he doesn't even flinch, which is proof that he's a crazy person, and he surges forwards . The two Wakandan's flank the doorway, Taser-spears out. I'm not getting out of this room, I realise.

I swear more, and throw the next three things that come to paw: the alarm clock, bedside phone, and a pillow. Out of all of them the only one that even makes him flinch is the pillow because it's been in contact with me and so probably counts as biological warfare at this point, and then he's on me. I scream, incoherent, wild-animal chittering, and dive back into my pillow-fort. He's having none of it, and no sooner than I'm in there, he rips off the top few layers of blankets leaving me as exposed as a new-born. I feel naked and helpless, more so than I did at Groot's death, more-so than I did in prison fighting off guys who would very much have liked to add me to their list of brutal romantic conquests. I flash back to being back in the lab that made me, helpless and afraid, and I scream.

Thor has absolutely zero patience for my screaming.

He grabs my tail.

Fuckers! Why does everyone go for the frickin' tail? Scruff of the neck, guys, it hurts far less! I scream _more_ and grab onto the bed-frame with both paws, before sinking my teeth and both footpaws deep into the memory foam of the mattress. Thor tugs, and despite the wave of pain it sends up my spine, I don't let go.

Thor tugs _harder._ The bed leaps three feet, and the pain is so severe that I scream and a little pee manages to force its way out, the scream breaking my bite on the mattress. Thor capitalises on my weakened grip on the bed, grabbing me by both tail and scruff of neck, and puts his boot up against the bedframe.

"I am not letting you waste away in this stinking garret room, Rabbit. You are getting help, even if I have to drag you and what's left of the bed there myself!"

"Fuck off!" I reply. Not my wittiest come back, but I was somewhat distracted at the time. With the sheets off, the cool air makes my fur feel grimy and exposed flesh clammy, and I can actually now appreciate just how rank I smell now there's some air, but I hold on with a feverish intensity.

This turns out to be a bad move, as Thor just pulls with enough force that my claws leave actual marks in the hardwood bed-frame before one claw-tip snaps, and with my grip weakened I lose my hold on the bed and both Thor and I go over in a heap backwards.

I respond fist, leaping up and diving for my bed again, but a strong hand grabs both of my rear paws mid-air, and I jerk to a halt, dropping to the sweat-damp sheets and flopping like a fish, hissing and spitting. Do fish spit? Who cares. Bad simile. I manage to grab onto grief-pillow, and the second tug-o-war starts as Thor tires to rip it away from me like a parent fighting to remove a toddler's favourite comforter. But with far more swearing.

After a few moments and a very serious attempt by me to bite off fingers which results in a bloody draw with Thor getting a few scratches and me losing a few bits of fur, Thor gives up, and just grabs my grief-pillow and drags it across the room, me still hanging off it, desperate not to let go. Add carpet burn to the list of injuries. What's next, a frickin' hickie?

Thor picks up the pillow, me hanging off it upside down, and presents it to the bathroom door. Very carefully, he closes the door on me. I panic: this is a good tactic. I'm now in the bathroom, but most of the mass of the pillow is still in the bedroom, and by closing the door in a slow and controlled manner he's able to slowly scissor it and me apart. With one hand on the door, controlling the size of the gap, and one pulling on the pillow, Thor squeezes the gap closed from six inches with me halving half the pillow, to four inches and I've got a third, to two inches and I'm just a skinny little racoon arm poking out of the bathroom door holding onto this stupid tear-stained pillow and fighting for dear life. I don't even know why I want the nasty pillow, but it smells familiar and it's mine, and I'm no mood to let him take that from me.

He does.

The pillow explodes, covering him, me and the room in feathers. I drop to the bathroom floor, spitting feathers and howling with grief and rage, but I don't get any time to enjoy it. He opens the door as soon as I hit the deck, and I see the pillow's carcass lying _right there,_ and like a sucker I run for it, aiming between his legs. It's what he's counting on me doing, and he catches me with a foot and punts me across the room. It's not a kick, his foot was moving slow before it hit me: it's only once he's got me he accelerates, tossing me neatly into the huge walk-in shower.

Shower? Oh no-no-no pal, I showered two weeks ago, and I wasn't' even nasty then. This is just unreasonable.

I leap for the shower door, but he slams it and I bounce off the glass, stunned. He opens the door and pins me with a foot, before turning the knob way above my head. I scream as the water hits me, trying to fight back. Yes, I'm filthy, but I've still got bits of the Groot-dust in my fur. I can still smell Quill and Gamora and Drax and Mantis on my clothing. This is all I have left of them, and I don't want to lose this. I try to explain this to Thor.

"Fuck you, you blonde piece of shit, I'm gonna piss on your grave you stupid pirate-angel cyclops! That eye's been up my butt! You have an actual butt eye you-"

Okay, so perhaps I lost a little something in translation.

Thor, ignoring this, starts to root thought the various mini bottles of shampoo and conditioner like he's got all the time in the world and isn't standing fully clothed in a shower pinning an angry cyborg racoon down with one foot. What have hotels got against full sized bottles? At first, on Xandar when I first encountered fancy hotels, I thought they were stocking my room with tiny bottles as a joke about my height, but after a misunderstanding and a few minor arson related incidents Quill explained it to me that his room had tiny bottles too. It's weird. Like the clothes hangers you can't take out. Do they not trust me for some reason? Is it because I always steal the wiring out of the room? Thor grabs every bottle on the shower shelf, and picks one apparently at random, reading out-loud. No surprise there, he probably needs a finger highlighting each letter to even read, the big stupid jock.

He goes through a half dozen bottles, giving me a precis of the labels.

"Now, let's see what we have here, Rabbit. Oh, well this sounds charming…. _A soothing mix of Frankincense and sandalwood with natural conditioning oils…"_

"I just lost Groot and you want to rub me with more dead trees you sicko? Get that stuff away from me and fuck off and die!"

"Maybe you're right, ah, how's this? _Organic Coco butter, coconut and Jaggery, perfect for dry skin types-"_

"Dry skin types who want to smell like a candy bar? Cacao will kill me, if you wanted to poison me use cyanide, it'll be quicker! Or just let me up and piss off!"

Thor laughs. There is absolutely no humour in it. He looks like he's had nearly as bad a time as I have. He pulls off the caps of every bottle, and sniffs the bunch of them, which is actually how I would have gone about sorting them.

"No, you're quite right, I can't let you die on me at this point Sweet Rabbit, so let's just start by finding something that will just cover the smell you're giving off, shall we?" he asks with a jovial sarcasm.

I snarl at him and tell him where to stick it, trying to ignore the fact the water is a notably darker colour after hits hit me and my fur is so greasy after days without grooming that most of the water just bounces off me. I can feel that black dust washing off me and I hate it because it sends me back to The Snap. I claw at Thor's foot, but he ignores me.

"Sensitive, delicate, gentle exfoliating… No. Therapeutic seaweed extract? Have these people ever smelt a beach at low tide? Gentle botanical extracts … no no and no what we need is…. Ah, here we go." He says, huffing a bottle like he's got a solvent problem "Oh wow, we have a tie between _Tee tree, eucalyptus and invigorating mint, with Wakandan baobab seed extract and Azerbaijani White Oil_ or we could go for _Panther-balm sports-massage shower-gel: extra strong edition._ Any preference Rabbit?"

"Death: yours and preferably also mine!" I yell, spitting: my butt is blocking the plug and the shower is actually starting to fill up and flow out into the rest of the hotel suite, sending fur, feathers from the pillow and general grime all over the place. Thor ignores this, and grins mirthlessly.

"You're right: probably safer to go for both."

"No, hell no keep that stinking over-mentol'd shit away from me. Don't you dare! _Don't you frickin' dare-"_

He frickin' dared.

I'm writhing around in menthol hell as he dumps both bottles on me, clawing and biting at his foot, but once I'm blinded by stinging foam he pounces, he kneels down and grabbing me by the throat so I can't turn my head, and uses the other hand to rub herbal goo and sodium laureth sulfate into my head-fur, but I manage to bite him at least twice so I consider it a draw. He then flips me over, to stop me biting at him, and pins me in place with a knee in the neck to he's got both hands free.

"Well, I've been in enough prisons to know where we go from here." I snarl into the puddle as he tries to undo the clasps on my armoured body-glove. "What with getting dumped by the girlfriend, can't say I blame you pal, I'm fucking irresistible." I yell, trying not to breathe in the dried on vomit in my fur as it re-hydrates and floats away. "It's my animal magnetism. Then again, maybe you were that way inclined to start with: the whole pirate angel look? Don't see many straight guys as ripped as you are Odinsson. No answer? What's the matter, pretty boy? ' roid's made you deaf? Oww…. Didn't they have _no more tears_ shampoo?" I ask, as he manages to unbuckle my uniform at the collar.

He pauses, and holds up a tiny bottle in my peripheral vision, but through the foam covering my muzzle I can't see so It could be _no more tears,_ or it could be the frickin' cure for Aa'skavarian clap for I know.

"That depends: If I let you have this, will you stop kicking, biting, insinuating I'm a homosexual and let me clean you up?"

I consider this. "Sure." I grudgingly reply. "Sure… or, and this is just an idea, Thor, you could do that, or, and this is just a suggestion made between friends, you could take that bottle, right, and stick it right up your ass, buddy, that way we'll both have something of a similar size up there, you frickin-"

He sighs, and tosses the bottle over his shoulder and resumes his attempt to chemically blind me with luxury bath products. I hiss with discomfort, wishing for the _no more tears_ but it's a point of principle: I don't negotiate with terrorists. Work for them, if the money's right, sure, but never negotiate with them. Just splitting the bill with those political fuckers at a restaurant turns into a protracted frickin' operation. Give me a good honest crook any-day.

That's why I like government work: never yet met a government that would let politics get in the way of making money and killing folk. If I weren't so honest I could maybe got into that myself.

I spend a good few minutes fighting with Thor as he tries to get my armour off and throwing insulations and innuendo and straight up calling him a faggot when he doesn't rise to innuendo, but this stoic fucker just won't react, and frankly, while I'm spiting mad and willing to resort to any low-blow, my heart's not really into the gay jokes: no-one ever tried to explain the birds and the bees to me until after my third prison, so I was shocked when I first learnt that two men fighting in a shower _isn't_ how babies get made. I don't actually have any preconceptions or prejudices in that area, but for all I know _he_ might, and I'm not gonna let my kindly liberal bleeding-heart disposition get in the way of insulting him. You have to make a stand on these things, I think, as I take the moral high road and try to flick shampoo in his eyes, snarling. He's not rising to my insults, and he's manged to get the outer body-shell of my jumpsuit off but he's struggling with the body-heat distributing graphene mesh I use to prevent my bionics casing hotspots because it's got matted into my fur, so I switch track before he can get me fully naked.

"I mean, what in particular is it you find attractive in me Odinsson? Not that I blame you, you're only human… well, I guess not, but still, is it my height, or is it the fur? What's your kink, is it midgets or just livestock?" This gets a reaction, his cortisol output spikes, and he sets his jaw, so I hit that spot again. "Ah, livestock, what's the matter, you been a _baaaaaaa_ d boy?" I laugh hysterically into the wet floor of the shower, tasting tears and shampoo as they run down my face. I can't stop laughing, crying and making sheep noises. I think I'm having a mental breakdown.

He swears: "Allfather!" and covers his nose and mouth with the back of his wrist as he turns his head to avoid the smell, and I realise he's not reacting to my insults. That's not what's caused his stress hormones to spike.

I manage to turn my head enough to look over my shoulder.

Ah, right. Because I've not been eating, exercising or keeping myself clean, the spinal hard points along my back have become inflamed, and at least two show sighs of infection. Looks bad, haven't had that happen to me since the Toy War on Halfworld. No tracking, thankfully, no gangrene. Just some loss of fur, inflammation, and some blistering around the metal ports. A six out of ten. I've had worse.

On the other hand, pretty boy here probably wasn't expecting to find that when he took my one-piece underwear off it took fur and skin with it. Not much, but he's defiantly knocked a scab or two off, and port number six is leaking puss and spinal fluid. They never did get that one right, I think, slightly fuzzily. I'm still laugh-crying at this point.

Now that I think about it, he probably wasn't expecting exposed bionics or the amount of scar tissue I have, either.

"What did they do to you, Rabbit?" he asks, grabbing a flannel and wiping away the worst of the blood. He lingers for a moment on a scar, and I wonder if he recognizes it as coming from a bullwhip and if so how.

I snarl: I don't want him digging into my past of visiting my personal history, but it's kind of hard to prevent this when he's poking at the large metal chunks sticking out of me with patent numbers on them. Some of the patents are just for the spinal ports, but other are for, well, _me,_ and that makes me uncomfortable.

I hate him, I release. Truly hate him. I don't want him to make me feel helpless and vulnerable like this, I don't want him to know about my past, the bad things I've done or the shitty upbringing I had. I blame him for dragging me and Groot into this fight with Thanos. I blame him for crashing into our spaceship and dragging the Guardians into this whole mess. I blame him for The Snap, for not killing Thanos when he had the chance, I blame him for not aiming for the frickin _head._ I tell him all this, as he holds me down and tries to clean me up, in between clawing at him and sarcastically yelling at him to soap my balls or go a little to the left while he's down there, but that's not actually what I'm feeling.

Because really, I'm hurting too badly to care about all that shit. Too badly to even process that it's happened. Deep down, I want to blame him for Groot, just for Groot. Groot's the only one that mattered: the one good thing I did in my lousy rotten criminal life.

But I can't. I can't blame him for Groot: I'm to busy blaming _myself._ I have no room for him. I just want him to leave me alone with my guilt.

That's the one thing I can honestly blame him for: for letting me live. For having this stupid intervention, and trying to save me from my guilt. From myself.

So I focus on hating him for that. I'm nothing if not determined.

I glare at Thor, when I realised he seriously isn't just going to let me waste away and while he tries, with the patience of a goddam saint, to get matted blood out of my toe-fur , and I decided to hurt him for it.

I look him dead in the eye, and say. "Hey, Odinsson." I spit, as he holds me in the shower and persists in trying to help me no matter what I throw at him verbally or physically. " Blondie, you know what I was doing while you were spectacularly failing to cut that damn glove off, buddy? Having a nice little chat with Groot while he melted away to dust, and you know what we talked about, big guy, you wanna frickin' know what his last words were?" I yell, screaming and spitting, tears mixing with the water. "He said _I am Groot!_ "

I get the inflection exactly right, and Thor flinches, like he's been slapped. Oh yeah, pretty boy, you're regretting taking that optional extra-credit course to learn to speak Groot now, aint ya?" because him and me are the only two people left in the universe who can understand what I just said.

And then the fucker hugs me.

I'm not expecting it, and I freak out. My body don't handle oxytocin so well, and I react badly, biting and scratching on reflex. He just takes it without compliant. Of course he does: he took my sarcastic instructions seriously when trying to clean me up. Didn't even flinch when I yelled that the last person to get my clothes of was his mom and that's what killed her, excess pleasure. He's ignored every low blow I threw at him. He's too frickin' stoic for his own good: biting won't do any good. What's worse, he's making those stupid calming _shush, shush_ noises as he hugs me like I'm a baby or some sort of frickin animal, and I hate it. I hate being treated like this.

Because it works. Groot knew that. I'd never let him do it in front of the rest of the team, but when Gamora and Quill and the others weren't looking, a cool-down hug did actually help me after combat or when the nightmares from my time in the lab got too real. Helped me realise that I don't have to be a hardass all the time. Hugging Groot made it okay, just for a second, for me to _feel._

I'll never get to hug him again, I realise.

I break.

The fight goes out of me. I just want to die. I sob and sob and I just can't stop. This really, really sucks. And I'm acutely aware that I'm having this moment mostly naked and in a Hotel shower with a frickin' Viking god who is cradling a goddam racoon. This is, from an outside perspective, comedy gold. Quill would have laughed himself unconscious, and I just can't stop crying. It's so frickin' undignified. The pain just won't stop.

Thor shushes me some more, and I decide that since my mind is clearly broken and since this moment couldn't possibly get more embarrassing, it's maybe okay to hug him back. I think I lost the last shreds of my natural dignity during the great shampoo fight, so what have I got to lose at this point? I close my eyes, and nuzzle into his shoulder and hope to any god that is out there that no one is recording this. He lets me cry myself out without speaking, which is what I need right now even if I hate myself for that fact, and he has the decently to wait until I'm done shaking and snorting before he speaks again. He doesn't even pass comment when I blow my nose into his shoulder, which I'll give him a grudging half-mark for.

"It's okay, Rabbit… it's okay. We…. We failed. You're right to blame me. The others say we shouldn't blame ourselves: that we should put all our blame on Thanos. But that seems very selfish, to me, Rabbit. He's already taken everything else, from us, why should we give him that as well?"

I snarl, more to remind him of who's boss than anything else.

"I want to kill him." I mutter into my own sodden fur.

Thor smiles: I can feel his cheeks twitch with my whiskers. "You know, with all the others trying to find some sort of plan to somehow undo this, or make it right, or help the half of a galaxy left behind, I think you're the only one out of them who has actually just come out with it and said that. They are all trying to be noble and constructive about this, for some reason."

I snort back laughter. "Fuck that" I think. Apparently I said that out loud, because Thor laughs grimly.

"Yes. The rage and vengeance, anger... Loss, regret, they're all tremendous motivators. They really do clear the mind, so I'm good to go, if you are."

I peal myself way from his shoulder long enough to give him the stink eye. I hate to think of the weird angles my fur must be sticking out at.

"Go? Go where?" I ask. I look like a drowned rat. He don't look to much better. I wonder when he last slept.

"Wherever Thanos is." He says.

I grin.

"You're insane." I inform him.

"That's a matter of opinion." He replies, mirroring my somewhat manic grin.

"You're in a hotel shower hugging a depressed racoon: You _are_ insane. Your opinion doesn't matter."

"That's just your option." He then frowns "Whats a racoon?"

"I don't know." I admit, before changing tract. "You have soap in your hair." I point out "It's sliding slowly down by your cheek: So far it looks like being the only thing in the region of your brain actually doing anything." I say. I laugh. It sounds fake, I know. I don't know why I laughed. I think stress and lack of food may have made me a little light-headed.

Find Thanos. Now there's an idea. Worst case scenario, I die horribly, which was kind of my best case scenario for staying in bed and not eating.

New best case scenario: Thanos dies horribly, and I'm no worse off than I am now and maybe get a little closure in the process.

I might die in the process, but I'm okay with that right now. Thor might too. Win-win. That'll teach him for having feelings for me and sharing a tender moment and that shit. Yeah, serves him right! Take that, feelings!

"And when we find him?" I ask. "Our boy Eitri the giant dwarf might be a little pissed off if we turn up there and ask for a second god-killing axe 'cause you lost the last one. " I point out.

"Also, I kinda went there hoping to get my own god killing weapon, so you owe me." I say. "This looks like a good idea on paper that is inevitably going to get royally-fucked on execution, or _a Starlord_ as I like to call them. I mean, in my current mental and physical state, I'm all for a suicide mission, don't get me wrong, but I'd still kinda like to know what advantages this plan has over, say, drinking and whoreing myself to death. "

"Um, it's going to be an epic, multi-day space faring mission of blood and vengeance claiming dozens, if not hundreds of lives in righteous fury?" said Thor. "You're with the strongest Avenger, It'll be cool. Duh."

I glare at him.

"So basically an average Guarians of the Galaxy shore-leave then?"

He looks at me weirdly for a moment.

"I go drinking with Drax: epic, multi-day space faring mission of blood and vengeance claiming dozens, if not hundreds of lives in righteous fury is a normal pub-crawl for us. Last time I got _really_ drunk we blew up a moon. What makes you think this might actually work?" I ask.

"Ah, that's easy, my tiny ring-tailed _Freki._ One, you've got me. I mean, come on." he says, gesturing to himself. "Have you seen me? Not to brag, but I'm an actual god. And a cool one:" he said, pointing. "God of Thunder, not one of the lame gods of mischief or poetry or farming or hammers or something, or the god of _please don't hurt my precious son, everything in the universe promise not to hurt him. Opps, I forgot to include mistletoe_." he said, in a feminine falsetto. "One of the cool gods, Rabbit!"

"Asgard has a god of hammers?" I ask, blankly. He ignores this.

"Two, we've got you: a planer, a master strategist, a gadget builder, and, with the right weapons, you're an expert warrior like me, I mean look at you..." he paused, then grimaced. "Okay so right now you're not looking your best." he conceded. " but you've got... um... heart? you fight like a devil, I'll give you that you've got spunk!"

"Please never say that again." I add.

"But you have passion! skills! legs! cunning-"

"Legs?"

"I was add-lib-ing." He concedes. "Cut me some slack Rabbit. The point is, we're quite a team. And Point three, out plan is beautifully, almost perfectly simple. We just find _Stormbreaker_ and use it to kill Thanos. It's so simple, an idiot child could almost have come up with it!" He says proudly, smiling what would have been a winning smile if he wasn't covered with feathers and bite-marks, standing in a shower fully clothed like an idiot child.

I pinch the bridge of my snout in frustration. Why are the hairless ones always so stupid?

"Find Stormbreaker?" I echo.

"Yes."

"The weapon that you lost, If I'm not mistaken, _in_ Thanos's chest?"

"Embedded _deep_ in Thanos's chest, but yes."

"U-huh? So how do we get it back, hotshot?" I ask.

"It fell away from him as he went backwards thought the portal." Says Thor.

"Oh, great: because that means that rather than being _with_ Thanos, It'll be lost in subspace and could be _literally anywhere in the universe!"_

Thor, weirdly, just grins at that.

"Ah, if only there was a planet covered in portals that every lost thing in the universe automatically gravitates towards…" he says jokingly.

 _Sakaar._ I realize with a shudder. _This man really **is**_ _insane_. I think. The one shithole in the galaxy I'd want to go back to even less than Halfworld. Great. Frickin' Great.

"Sakaar? You're not just insane, you're stupid: it's the other end of the frickin' galaxy!" I say, angrily. "It would be quicker to head back to Nidavellir and get Eitri and make a new one, I mean, sure it nearly killed you last time, but now that the sun is re-started all we'd need is the mould, another lump of that super strong super rare metal and a-"

My breath catches in my throat. I shudder and shake losing my grip on him, and Thor grabs me and holds me like a baby because it looks like I'm having a frickin' seizure. Maybe I am. I can't breathe. How could I have been so stupid?

What does it take to make a god killing weapon?

The fire of a dying star to forge it, a master craftsman to shape it, a few pounds of a special metal so rare that it makes Vibranium look like it came from the dollar menu… and a handle.

 _A handle._

There's a chunk of Groot out there that survived The Snap, I realise. I don't know how Groot regenerated that last time he… well, last time he died. I don't know if it was a special chunk of him, or if he pre-selected that bit to grow back, like a back-up of him before going into danger or what. And I _know_ that the Groot I got back wasn't exactly the Groot who sacrificed himself to save me and the other guardians, and that was painful for me. I know it's a stupid, hopeless fools-errand to even _hope_ that… that…

 _There's a chunk of Groot out there. And even if it's not a chunk that's going to grow back, are you really going to leave it lying in some trash-heap on Sakaar?_ I ask myself.

I clutch at Thor's shirt in a panic, because I'm slipping down out of his grasp. We are both still soaking wet and covered in conditioner, it's kinda slippery.

"I'm in." I say. "This… this doesn't mean I think your plan will work, or that I agree with it, or that I forgive you… but I'm in. if there is any hope that this might work, and that we can find that axe again, and put it on your hand and kill that big purple S.O.B, then I'm in. To the bitter end."

Thor smiles, and it's the first one I've seen on him that seems genuine.

He holds out a hand. I, cautiously, take it.

"Thor and Rabbit, on the road to vengeance, no matter what!" he booms.

"No matter what." I say, trying to hide my evil grin and wondering, hypothetically, just how hard it would be to steal that axe from him once we find it. Groot's re-birth of just Groot's bones, whatever's left of him is mine, not Thor's.

He doesn't need to know that right now, though, does he?

Thor pulls me by the hand into a one-armed Hug. I would protest, but the breath goes from me with an _oof!_ He puts a hand on the back of my head, and holds me close. He's crying, I realise.

"To the end, Rabbit! Through thick and thin, need we conquer worlds, or face the cold winds of Niflheim itself, no matter the danger we will stand together as brothers and face down the entire universe if we need to, for no matter that stands before us _it will fall!_ " He says.

"Our vengeance will be swift, and dreadful and terrible in its fury and…and did you just vomit on me?" he asks, no doubt feeling the back of his shirt go damp as I wretch over his shoulder.

"My body may have gone into starvation mode. I might have lost control over some wetware subsystems. Also I think I swallowed some of the shower water by mistake when you were holding me down. It's full of soap: it's nasty." I groan, queasily, proving that while I might not be my usual deadly self when weakened by starvation, I can still kill the moment.

"But I want you to know," I add. "if my body wasn't on the point of shutting down from starvation and if I still had any control over my stomach, Thor… I'd have done that intentionally given half the chance, because I don't forgive you for killing Groot, half the universe, and my pillow. You idiot."

I tell him. I believe in starting new friendships on the right note, even when I'm planning to betray and rob them down the line. Saves time. My honesty, like my humility, is fucking commendable.

Thor stays there for a long moment, kneeling in the shower cradling me with my snout over his shoulder and soapy stomach-water soaking into his clothing and, unwilling to make eye contact, I can only guess at his facial expression as we stay like that for a long moment, and I think we both realize then and there that maybe we're not _quite_ ready to take on the universe yet. We may, in fact, need some sort of a plan.

Grinning and grimacing in equal measure, Thor pats me hesitantly on the back making a vague squelching noise off my sodden fur.

"That's…. that's okay Rabbit. I'm not quite ready to forgive _myself_ yet, so you take your own time. For now, let's just focus on getting you well, and then we can come up with a plan to get from here to Sakaar. Okay?"

I make eye contact with Thor in the reflections from the walk-in shower's glass sides, and open my mouth to tell him I agree, and that maybe Groot dying isn't _entirely_ his fault.

I've swallowed a lot more shower-water than I realise, and as soon as I open my mouth to talk I gag and dry-heave, making coughing, wrenching noses right in his ear as I aim myself over his shoulder again just in case. Feels like a furball, but it can't be because I've not been grooming myself because of the depression, and when I do I'm careful not to ingest. I end up hawking and spitting into the corner of the shower. I honestly don't remember eating that clump of feathers: must have been when we were fighting over the pillow. I slump, exhausted. How did I let myself get this weak? I burp, and lean on his shoulder again, queasy, feather stuck to my muzzle.

And that is how the galaxy's most feared Vengeance team-up starts, boys and girls.

Thor and I spend a long moment studying our own reflections in the glass and wondering just how the hell we got here. Thor pats my back again, vaguely, and then says what we were both thinking.

"Well…. This is going to suck."


	3. Chapter 3, part 1:Mirror in the Bathroom

**Chapter three: the planning stage.**

 **Part one: Mirror in the bathroom, please don't freak**

I sit on the closed lid of the toilet, swaddled in the Wakandan hotel's apparently limitless supply of fluffy white towels as an Asgardian thunder-god draws on the misted up mirror, and I wearily think, that this isn't usually how you start planning for a heist.

Which is exactly what we're realising we'll have to do to get off this dirt-ball of a planet.

I'm tired, acing, nodding off and still slightly damp and smelling of eucalyptol and soap. My blue armoured body-glove is draped, dripping, over the door of the shower. My graphene inner shell hanging off the empty town rail, drying. They're the only clothes I have with me. I have a Ravengers black set (which Quill repeatedly instils in in fact a fictional colour called red) and my old brown set (which Quill calls orange), but they're wherever the ship is, lost on Titian, perhaps.

With my dead friends.

Thor has just told me. Stark and Nebula just sent their second garbled message from Titan. It was the arrival of that message that caused the other survivors of the battle to call a meeting, and my absence was noted, which is why I'm not wasting away as I'd planned to spend my evenings doing this week, and why my room looks like a goose, a machine gun and bilge-snipe had destructive make-up sex in it. A melee-a-trois if you will.

The suite is flooded: no one showers me against my will and has their bathroom survive the process. Thor has dried me off and built a dam out of the soiled and fur-covered towels and the over-large bathrobe to try and futilely protect what's left of the suite, or maybe the room below it, from the water. I'm sitting on the second stack of towels, the ones he used to fluff up my fur once I'd mostly dried. I'm small: I lose body-heat very quickly when I'm wet, even in a controlled environment like this, so as soon as I was out of the hot shower I crashed and Thor had to rub at me with towels and find some weird noisy thing to blow hot air at me to stop me going into shock, and I'm dressed in the third set of towels, wrapped up so snuggly I can barely move and I'm just a snout and a pair of little paws poking out of a pile of fluffy white cotton.

And all my friends are dead.

I struggle to process that. I'm too hollowed out over Groot to feel it as I should, I know. I'm doing them a disservice. Quill in particular, was pretty okay for someone who wasn't Groot: he was sure-as-shit a lot better a guy than me. Gamora and Drax too, even Mantis, who was a bit too nice for my tastes, was still okay. Still someone I'll miss. The loss of all of them is just too much for me to deal with right now, especially hearing it second-hand in this sterile little bathroom on the far side of the galaxy. I never thought we'd all live: we were in a dangerous business, us Guardians of the Galaxy, so it's not like I'd expected us to all make it out alive, but I always figured I'd be the first to buy the farm. I mean, it's not like I have the longest lifespan anyway, and I'm the least durable of the bunch once bullets start flying. It's ridiculous that I'd be the last one alive. Insane. Proof of the blind idiot malice of the gods. And even if they did die, I somehow always assumed I'd, if I'd not get the chance to say goodbye, at least be there with them, close enough to smell the blood.

Smell the ash. That damn snap. Oh Quill…

I can't deal with this right now, I realise. I have two options: break for the second time in a quarter hour and hope something of my mind survives, or close my eyes, take a deep breath, ignore this for now, and push on and do what needs doing if I want revenge.

If I want to avenge _them._

I take that deep breath, smelling myself, mostly: clean fur, tea-tree and menthol, wet cotton, blood, minor infection, tiredness. Beyond that secondary scents: chlorine, feathers, plaster dust and a little Asgardian perspiration. I focus on this, saving every detail in my memory. One day, when I have time to mourn, I'll come back to this moment, and do it right that time round. Like I'm a real person with actual feelings.

But not today.

I shiver in my little cocoon of towels, clenching hands and footpaws into little fists. The ache is still there, in the pit of my stomach, and on top of that I'm sick, and after my fight with Thor everything hurts, and everyone I know is dead.

This sucks.

"Any other news?" I ask. Just in case it's started raining spiders while I was sleeping or some shit.

Thor snorts a half-laugh, and shakes his head.

"Thunder and fury: nothing meaningful. This has effected the whole of Midgard, possibly all the nine realms. Terran governments are in chaos, and the only reason several civil wars haven't started is because everyone's in too much shock to act. Even the Wakandan government is severely destabilised, Sweet Rabbit, although the presence on what remains of the Avengers is keeping the peace for now, such as it it: with the loss of manpower law enforcement, militaries, healers and food suppliers are struggling across this planet. Thanos may have doubled the resources per person, but he hasn't halved the distance between farm and market. Food is rotting in the fields across Wakanda, and it will be worse in neighbouring countries with less advanced transport and logistics. This will get far worse before it gets better."

"Perfect." I mutter, pinching my snout with frustration, the towel I've got draped over my head like a hood shifting slightly "Because I always wanted to be stuck on a primitive world when the food runs out. When the mob breaks the door down, we can finally find out if Quill was right and I actually taste like turkey." I say, still slightly annoyed, years later, to find out that both Drax and Quill had previously eaten something very similar to me.

"I'd guess some-where between capon and squirrel, if you ask. But probably with boar-taint in your case. I shouldn't think you'd want to worry, Rabbit, you look too stringy for anyone to want to eat. I mean, you even smell gamey." Thor says, leaning back against the sink and pointing helpfully.

I glare. "Geez. Thanks." I scrub at my face with my paws. I pass on making a comment on how he smells. Better than Terran, but that's not saying much. I also pass on or telling him if he wants to check exactly how I taste he can suck my cock, because he looks like he's had a hard day and I'm working very hard at being nice right now. I recall he has an ex somewhere on earth, and I'm literally asking him if he knows if she's all right when I see his eyes and bite my tongue. Do I want to be worrying about if Lylla is alive right now? No. So he probably doesn't want to be worrying about this Jane Foster. I decide to focus on business, and not on my significant otter, and hope he'll do the same.

"So, how do we get off this dirtball and to Sakaar before someone finds out just how gamey I am?" I ask. "Wakanda doesn't look as primitive as the rest of this planet, and we're on their equator: is it too much to ask they have a space elevator?"

Thor, who's been amusing himself by pulling the mirror aside and rooting thought the jars and bottles behind it shrugs, pops two aspirin, and then offers me the jar. I crunch mine as he replies, trying not to think about how Groot could make his own aspirin at will.

"No, I don't think so. They-" he swallows the pills. Whole, without water: this man is a dangerous lunatic. "They don't have giant spiders here anymore, I think I killed the last one about eleven or twelve-hundred years ago, and their genetic modification isn't good enough for synthetic unbreakable silk. If they had genetic modification their men wouldn't be so puny and poorly endowed, and I don't think they can work graphene yet."

"Hicks probably haven't stopped trying to have sex with turnips yet, so it figures." I rub my chin. "Spaceport?" I ask.

Thor shakes his head. "They don't have one, not that I know of."

"Wakanda _doesn't have a spaceport?_ " I ask, incredulously. I was led to believe this was the most advanced of their tiny, adorable, sub-planetary empires.

Thor speaks around a finger in his mouth, trying to get some stubborn aspirin out from a molar. You should have chewed properly, buddy. "No, not Wakanda: _Terra."_

I gape, stupefied. "So how do they get into space?" I ask. I'm so shocked I don't bother to close my mouth again: this ridiculous little planet doesn't deserve my full attention.

Thor shrugs. "Mostly, they don't. They have a few orbital vessels, but probably less than a dozen. To my knowledge the only humans to have left he solar system have been brought there by other more advanced nations, mostly the Kree."

"Yeah well, that sounds like those Kree fuckers, sure enough. Never yet met a race they didn't want to abduct and recruit into their wars. Stars!" I swear, mussing my cheek fur. "So without the Biforst, we're actually trapped here?" I ask. Suddenly I'm wondering how you make yourself _more_ gamey, just in case I need to avoid the stewpot. Probably you need to chew on nettle leaves or some shit. God I hate terrans.

Thor paused, for a moment, and then rubbed his chin.

"Not necessarily. I friend of mine, the Hulk, managed to get off-world in a Quinjet."

"Okay, two questions: One, who the hell has a friend called _'The Hulk'_ and Two, what's a Quinjet?"

"Bruce Banner."

"A Quinjet is bruise manner?" I ask, tired and confused. Thor just stares.

"No… no the jet is a jet, Bruce Banner _is_ the Hulk: he gets really really angry turns into a big green person and the second strongest avenger."

I resit the temptation to ask Thor if those are two separate people he turns into: that sentence could have benefited from an extra coma, but now's not the time. "And the Quinnjet?" I ask, rubbing my chin. Having lost both Groot and, apparently, Drax, we could probably do with some extra muscle, so this Hulk sounds promising. Stupid name, but promising.

Like many people I could think of. Gods, I'm gonna miss you Starlord.

Thor nods. "Quinnjet: a primitive form of flying ship. Not as good as Asgard 's _Skíðblaðnir_ class, but a reasonable sub-orbital. Slow, heavy, but quite agile, good room in the back. Roomy, air-con, coms-system, little teeny tiny refrigerator for drinks and medical supplies. Not a bad vehicle."

I frown. "One of these stupid noisy Terran Refrigerators with a moving pump in it?" I ask. Because that noise is one I need bugging me from here to Sakaar like I need ear mites.

Thor cracks a grin, and leans in. "I know right? The first time I heard one I thought a horrifying troll must have crept into the room, and then it went _click_ and started making this hideous _whur-u-hur-u-hur_ noise like Gullinbursti hunting truffles and then a deathly rattle! So I leapt up and smote it mightily with my hammer but then Jane said the rattling was just the ice-maker … and anyway that's how we lost the deposit on the London flat and got into a fist-fight with the neighbour when the fringe came through their wall and killed their dog." he said, leaning back again. "True story."

"You astound me. Ugg, what's wrong with these people?"

"A third of them have a parasitical brain infection contracted from domestic cats that biases them towards risky behaviour." Said Thor knowingly, still going through the medical caddy from behind the mirror "I mean, would you fight me over a Chihuahua? Have you seen me?"

I glare. "No, I mean why don't they just cool stuff down the easy way?" I ask. I then say "Graphene filament Thermoelectric coolers" at the same time he says "Just open a portal to Niflheim. Or use a chunk of dead Ice-giant for cooling drinks."

"What?" I ask

"What?" he asks. We glare at each other, before I shiver and look down.

"Never mind, not important." I say rubbing at one of my clavicle implants, which is leaking lymph and itching like the Askarvarian clap" So A sub-orbital? How'd he get it to Sakaar then?"

Thor shrugs, once again preferring to use his muscles to his words, I notice. "It was going pretty close to escape velocity, but it dispersed before we got an orbital track. My bet is, it just got lost. Lost things find their way to Sakaar."

I consider this. "You reckon there's a portal?" I ask.

He nods, pulling out a transparent tube full of fluffy white disks from the medical caddy, and setting them aside.

"There must be Rabbit. It's the only way he could get to Sakaar: an as-yet undocumented portal. It would explain not only his arrival there, but the presence of Terran artefacts on Sakaar: I saw some last time I was there, amongst the weapons gladiators can choose from."

"Yeah, well the last time I was there all I saw was a bunch of stuff I wanted to unsee really fucking quick, I can tell you." I mutter. "I don't like losing friends, but having to leave them behind is even worse." I add, trying to forget the area and the shouting off the mobs with a shudder. It was bad enough, pressed in that audience, huge hairless unwashed bodies swaying back and forth with the flow of the fight as they shouted and cheered on the combatants in the ring, but trust me on this, it's far worse when you know that some the combatants were made by the same sick fucks that designed you.

A random thought struck me. "Do you think the… the…"

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

Thor notices my grimace, and says it for me. "The Snap?"

"Yeah. That." I shudder. "You think that effected Sakaar?"

"Yes, this looks to have reached the whole galaxy."

"Humm, that could have destabilized the place, may work with us, may work against us: we'll need to plan around it." A second random thought struck. "Oh man, I hope Doug is still alive: He's the one guy on Sakaar I know who could help us out.

I notice the momentary look of panic that flits across blondie's face, and deduce nothing good from it or the way he quickly changes the topic of conversation.

"Let's focus on finding the portal first, okay?"

RIP Doug, you stupid glorious fucker, I think. But I say "Sure. How hard could it be? Re-wire a broad spectrum scanning suite to look for the gamma-ray signature of a subspace rift: kindergarten stuff. Safety scissors and glitter easy, so long as you can get some basic parts."

I notice the look I'm getting, and remember where I am and pinch the bridge of my snout.

"They don't have the tech, do they? These Wakandan fucks with their solid vibranium sex-toys still don't have standard scanning suites, do they?"

"No. Fortunately, we do have one of Terra's top experts on Gamma ray energy right in this hotel, as it happens." He says, leaning in a tweaking my towel aside to glance and the leaking bionic poking out of my collarbone. "He should be able to cobble something together-"

He reaches to touch the damaged implant, and I panic and reflexively bite at his fingers. He pulls his hand back with lightning reflexes, which is on theme for him if I think about it, and my jaws snap shut on air, whiskers just grazing him.

"Watch it!" I snarl, holding the towel over me like this is the start of some cheap porno. "Look but don't touch, idiot!" I yell, and immediately regret it because between that line and the fact were in a hotel bathroom we've defiantly just shifted into blue movie territory. He looks in concerned, and I hiss at him and try to fluff my fur up to make myself big, but I'm so tightly swaddled in towels you can't tell.

Thor glances down, and like a sucker I do too. The leaking lymph has started to stain the cotton of the towel a sick yellow-ish colour at that point, and it's not the only place. Days without food or bathing has left me running a high fever and fighting secondary infections around most of my hardware/wetware points, and I'm bleeding or otherwise leaking through the cotton in a dozen places, most of them embarrassing to some degree. Not enough for the blood loss to be life threatening, but left unchecked the infection could be, and there'll be fresh scar tissue around the exposed bionics: Some poor minimum wage hotel employee is finding the fucking racoon Turin Shroud in amongst the wreckage of this hotel suite. Whoever has to clean up after super heroes sure-as-shit doesn't get paid enough, I blearily think.

I know what Thor is going to say even before he sets his jaw in a look of heroic determination and stands up, shoulders squared, reaching towards the door.

"You need medical attention Rabbit. Guards, fetch a doctor immediately! My friend's nipples are bleeding!"

"I don't need a doctor." I say and- _wait, what?_

"Why would you choose _that_ specific detail to include and yell it out for everyone to hear? And it's not a nipple, it's clearly metallic. I don't care how cold it gets in Asgard, matey boy, if it can cut glass it ain't a nipple! It's a mid-chest wetware/hardware point! And if it was a nipple, surely there'd be at least six of them? Right? Right? Weirdo."

"-get a paramedic and some medical-"

"I don't need a doctor!" I yell, and he notes the rising edge of panic in my voice. It gives him pause.

"Please." I say. "Please, no Doctors I, I…. I can't." I say.

Thor glances down at me, a strange amalgam of indecisiveness, pity and disgust on his face. Oh boy, I've seen that look before. There is a tightness in my chest, an anxiety that the mere mention of Doctors causes in me, and one I've never been able to shift. There's a panic inside and I hold my breath to stop it spilling out, my face frozen, clutching at my chest. There is a big surgical scar there, under the fur, chin to bollocks, right down the middle, and I have no desire to get any new ones where someone opens me up to poke around and work out what's in there. Especially given how I was conscious the last time someone opened me up like that, and still occasionally flash back to it.

"Please, it's it's just a minor infection. I can fix it myself. I don't need doctors, just some first aid basics. Please, just… please." I plead, adding just enough wheedle into my voice to make it sound controlled and hide my raw panic. I ain't too proud to beg, especially when the alternative is pants wetting horror followed by immediate vivisection.

Thor sighs, and raises his hand to his head in the expression of someone who knows he's about to regret the decision he's making.

"Okay. What do you need, Rabbit?"

I frown, sniff diagnostically at the gooiest looking wound, mid chest, and then waddle over to the sink, and pull myself up using the ramp of random wrecked furniture by it, and draw on the mirror, trying to remember my organic chemistry functional groups and accessing some of my saved memories from the molecular biology files.

I draw a big donut. "What's that?" I ask Thor.

"A donut. Wait, is this psychoanalytical? If so, then whatever answer makes me look caring, yet manful." Says Thor, striking a pose.

I glare, and draw a big hexagon around the donut.

"Okay, what about now?" I ask, tapping the hexagonal shape.

"A donut trapped in a honeycomb. A honey cake? Some sort of glaze?" he asks. I'm about to swear when he adds, as an afterthought "That or a benzene ring. You're using standard Xandarian organic chemistry graphology, are you not?"

I grunt, grudgingly. Our boy form Asgard isn't _entirely_ stupid, it appears. I keep my scowl going as I draw on the functional groups, though: I don't what him to let it go to his head.

"That, in a topical cream, 400 milligrams. That, orally, 200 milligrams dosage, three times a day. Ten days' worth for each one. My body can handle those." I say, tapping at the pair of molecules I've drawn on the misted glass. I sure hope these hicks can recognise standard molecular notations as well as Thor can, or I'm humped.

Thor nodded, and gestures to one of the guards. "Here." He says, ripping the mirror of the hinges. "The drugs requested."

The guard looks at him like he was insane, puts the mirror down, and then takes out a primitive communicator and photographs of the mirror like a sensible person. She then summons the male guard, runs a reverse image search, and sends him to fetch amoycilling a flufloxicullin, which is apparently this planet's stupid names for those drugs.

Thor nodded, and grudgingly waves them out. "Even with anti-biotics, those wounds will fester if you don't clear out initial infection sites. Assuming you take a large loading dose, it will still take time for the drugs to build up to a usable level in your system."

I grunt, but he's right. I sit myself back down on the closed toilet seat and try to get reasonably comfortable, because I'm 90% sure that what I'm about to do will suck, hard. I scan the room.

"Those, those white fluffy things in the see-through tube. What are they?" I ask, pointing.

Thor picks up the pack, and examines it. "Make-up removal pads, 100% cotton."

I nod. "That'll do. Get a bunch of those in that cup, the one with a toothbrush in it, and then fill the cup with Vodka."

"Vodka?"

"Whiskey. Gin. Frickin' Kree absinthe, I ain't fussy, I just need ethanol as an antiseptic."

Thor starts putting the pads in the cup, tossing away the toothbrush. Philistine… don't you know you can make a perfectly good shank out of one of those? Approach the guy with it in your mouth and pretend to be brushing, get them with their guard down _and_ put plaque in their would, if you're lucky. This dolt wouldn't last a day in prison. He's far, far too pretty, dumb fuck.

"I'm guessing that you didn't leave any booze in the mini-bar?" he asks. I don't bother to reply, because that's a stupid question: if they wanted there to still be booze at this stage, they'd have started with way bigger bottles.

Even then, maybe not.

"And I doubt they'll be happy if I ask for more alcohol for this room." He continues.

"Why?" I ask, offended. These guys have no sense of hospitality.

He glares, counting out little fluffy cotton disks. "You threw up, set fire to the room, and then pissed yourself."

"So? Last time I went drinking with Drax we broke a three-thousand year old religion. I wasn't even properly drunk: the trick is to take a tactical chunder early, stop yourself from getting too wasted to fast and free up extra stomach space. That's the smart move." I say, tapping at my temple knowingly.

"I… I have no idea how to deal with that." says Thor, so I'll at least give him some credit for honesty. "I doubt that knowledge will encourage them to give you more booze."

I groan, I don't want to survive The Snap only to die of preventable infections, and I certainly don't want to do it sober. I scan the room, and I spot the word _antiseptic_ in English on a bottle in the cubby where the mirror used to be. I point.

"That. That thing there." I say, too tired to articulate further. Thor, reluctantly, fetches it. He reads the label, unhelpfully, because I'm already looking at it.

"Listerine antiseptic mouthwash, original flavour… the ingredients seem to be mostly water, ethanol and secondary antiseptics. This should be good for external use and-" he looks up.

I'm making the _gimme gimme_ gesture, opening and closing both outstretched paws. I have no interest in listening to him read the entire life history of a damn bottle of mouthwash. He sighs, and hands me the bottle, and I go to open it. I then hand it back, because there is some kind of stupid child-proof top. He pops the top, for me, hands it back, and I sniff at the bottle. It smells like a bloody hospital, but I'm not detecting anything that will give me long term harm, I fact it's only the hint of Benzoic acid that stops me drinking it then and there to spite him. I hand it back. He tops up the cup, and passes me back the bottle. I stare at it stupidly.

"No… I only need you to soak the things with it: I don't need a full bottle of antiseptic."

"No." says Thor. "But you could _really_ do with some mouthwash, Rabbit."

I bare my yellowed teeth at him. I'm in no mood for jabs at my appearance: he's here to formulate a revenge plan with me, not try and date me, so why would I care about something like that?

Then again, poor hygiene is exactly how I got into this mess, and after all the booze induced vomiting my mouth tastes like a skunks bedpan, so I reluctantly take the bottle back, take a swish, realise I can't reach the sink and I'm on a closed toilet, so I'm forced to just gargle and turn sideways, spitting on the floor. Lovely. I'm such a charmer when I'm pissed off and inches from death.

"You're making a fuss over nothing." I say

"When did you last brush your teeth?"

"I dunno. What day is this? What calendar do they even use here? Ummm, the day before I found your ass floating in space." I realise I have no idea how long ago that might have been. How long was I even out for?

Questions for another time, I realise. Given the situation, I take a second hit of the mouthwash for good measure, spitting vaguely but not quite in Thor's direction once I'm done. You have to establish dominance early on with these big dumb fuckers or sooner or later they'll turn on you and/or try to bugger you in the exercise yard.

I grin, letting him get a good look and my nice clean pearly whites, before nodding to the cabinet.

"Okay, so if this is anything like Quill's medicine cabinet, they'll be some sort of shaving kit. Most of these Wakandan's I've seen have been more than usually furless, and those bald headed elites aren't staying that way naturally. If there's a needle or a lancet, take that. If not, I need a razor."

Thor nods, finds a tiny shaving kit, starts pulling apart, and come out a few moments later with a mid-range plastic double-bladed safety razor. I nod.

"Pull it apart. I need the bade." I say. He nods, twists the plastic, shattering it neatly and managing to do so without cutting his hands, which is a neat trick, although he does cuss in surprise as it snaps. He pulls the least bent of the twin blades out of the wreckage, holds it out to me, and then… hesitates.

"You're… you're not going to do anything foolish, are you Rabbit?" he asks.

 _Like what, running with scissors?_ I'm about to sarcastically ask, when I catch his eye and also catch my breath in my chest.

 _He's legitimately worried I'm going to kill myself_. I realise.

Fat chance, I think: I've got the idea of revenge in my head now, thanks to you, blondie, and I follow through on even my dumbest ideas, which is why I'm so rich, successful and popular. I'm in this 'till the Endgame. But given I've just spent Groot knows how long moping around in bed literally waiting to die, I can kinda understand his concerns.

I explain this to him gently, the best I can.

"Moron! If I was going to top myself I'd have just asked for common drugs I knew would poison me when ordering antibiotics, numb-nuts. Sheash! If I wanted to kill myself, I'd just ask you to pass something and bite a live cable when your back was turned! Come on!" I complain. "use a little imagination. Okay, now, pass me the cotton pads."

Thor hesitates, quickly scans the room and then turns and grabs the cup quickly, as if expecting me to have found a high voltage main in the second he looked away. I give him a meaningful glare, and hold out a paw for the blade when accepting the cup o' antiseptic pads.

"Sterilise it, and hand it over." I order him. To my surprise, rather than look for matches or a lighter, he holds the blade in one hand, and then makes a "C" shape with the thumb and index finger of the other hand, screws his face up like he's constipated, and arcs a little electricity between the gap, passing the blade thought the miniaturised lightning strike. I hide my surprise, as I take the slightly warm fire-blackened blade from him. He's hesitant, and doesn't let go of his end of the razor-blade.

"Cute trick." I sneer, "Making little sparkles come out your fingers? I can make electricity too, although you need my fur to be dry, and like, forty balloons to rub me with." I say.

Gods, Quill's birthday party got odd that year. Don't drink wood alcohol, kids, it don't end pretty.

Thor takes back the blade. "Maybe I should do this. What do you need a blade for?"

"Lancing any abscess that've formed around a hard-point." I tell him, disinterestedly, making a mental note of which ones look unacceptably gooey. "So we can swab them out with the cotton wipes."

He gags slightly. _Well you did ask._ I see him shudder, and rally. "Well, I guess I could do that. You are after all a dear friend and ally…"

"No." I say, flatly.

"No?" he asks "Rabbit I promise I won't hurt y-"

"It's not that. Oh, you can do any I can't reach, but I'm going to need you to do the other job. You've got bigger, stronger fingers that I have, see?"

He stares, clearly not getting it. I sigh. "Look, one of us will have to pop the thing to drain it, the other's going to have to squeeze out any material in the wound, and I've only got tiny fingers so-"

He holds up an hand indicating I should stop, turns his head, looking like he's about to hurl, and eventual speaks. "I see. Oh. Goody. Anything else I should know, before we start?"

 _Yes, once you groom my fur we're mated for life. You are now my wife under raccoon law._ I'm tempted to say, just to screw with him, but I don't because he's had a hard day, and given the very gross stuff I'm about to ask him to do to my body I don't want this to be any gayer than it already no doubt is. Not that I'm prejudiced, but after years in prison I can say with some certainty that if I _was_ to ever go in that direction I'd like to be the top, and in this case that would involve a stepladder and all the brain-bleach in the goddam universe.

"Yeah, I'm going to need you to get a dry one of those pads to catch anything that leaks out so it doesn't matt my fur, and after were done I'll need some bandages, and something that can soak up any blood or lymph without sticking. Cellucotton, or similar."

He nods, thinks for a moment, and goes back into the medicine cabinet the hotel hand thoughtfully stocked with most everything, it looked like. He rummages, pulls out and removes the packaging from a small cylindrical plastic object that I couldn't determine any useful function for, especially the silly dangling string, snaps it in half and pulls out a wadded piece of crimped celucotton from within the plastic shell. Weird, but I'm not complaining.

"Wash you paws, and we're good to go." I tell him.

I check the most obvious, painful spots first. My shoulder, clavicle and mid-chest points are a mess, and a quick examination of the towel that was on my back lets me know at least three of my five main dorsal points are weeping. Other than the back, I deal with these on my own, quickly and efficiently. Sniff to diagnose, blade, wince, squeeze, wince, get nurse Ratchet there to hand me an antiseptic soaked pad, clean, really goddam wince because it stings, sniff to check, bind, repeat. I don't even need to make good on my threat to bring Thor's big strong fingers into it until it comes to the dorsal points. I can't reach the small of my own back and see well enough to do the job, so I reluctantly lie flat on the toilet seat covering myself with a towel like I'm getting the worlds weirdest massage. I bite down to avoid screaming and put claw marks in the seat rim as God of klutzes here pokes around at me like I'm a slab of meat, complaining all the time.

"I… Ugggggg! There's puss, Rabbit!"

"What did you expect, Accenberry pudding? And it's not _all_ puss, some of that is a condensate from the electronics, you see it's a _ahhhhh!_ Actually an Inorganic-"

"I don't care! It smells!"

"My sense of smell is over a thousand times more powerful than yours! You don't get to frickin' complain, ya' big girl's blouse!" I wince, and flinch as the cold mouthwash from the pad oozes over and into my fur. Gosh that's cold.

"Ugg, that was the last dorsal port," I say, as he covers it with a scrap of cellucotton and binds it in place with a bandage he acquired by sheer dint of shouting at the Wakandan guards until they fetched some.

"Allfather, so we're done?" he asks.

"Yeah, don't sound so relived yet, one more port to check." I mutter, wishing that I didn't have to do this. But I do. If there was one port that was _bound_ to get nasty, it would be the one that was nasty anyway. Maybe the new antiseptic silver nanoparticles I plated it with last maintenance cycle did the trick and it'll be okay?

Shit, still need to check, 'tho, don't I?

Wincing, He may be Thor, but my back ish Thucking _agony,_ I sit up, grimace with pain, close my eyes, and slip a paw under the towel covering me from the waist down. I find it in seconds, and it's a little hot and a little sore to touch, but that could just be from my general fever. I pull out a claw and sniff it, trying to see if it's got the taint of infection buy of course, my hands smell of that damn mouthwash, don't they? Shoot, I can't tell if it's infected or not.

Someone is going to have to check.

 _Oh no._

Well, it's not going to get any less embarrassing if I wait any, and Thor is already looking horrified by the fact I just apparently scratch n' sniffed myself, so I fill him in on the details.

"Yeah, so… when the built me the design spec was for an all-round combat unit with the possibility for ship piloting in combat. So when they built me, they optimised some sub-systems for space combat. You with me so far?"

"I Guess." Says Thor. I wince, and nod.

"So… you know the limitations of space suits?" I ask. Thor shakes his head.

"I don't need one, I mean, come on? Have you seen me? I'm an actual god." He says, grinning.

"And it's getting real old. Okay, so… us mortals we, errrm…. You can't pee your pants in a spacesuit. It damages the fabric, messes up the heat exchange layers, can fry electronics. Not good. So, you need either adult dippers, or if you know you're going to be doing this shit regularly, get fitted with a catheter. "

"A catheter." Said Thor, hollowly.

"Yeah. So…. So I was a prototype model. Quite an expensive one, they needed to do a lot of work on my by hand, eye stuff in. They were basically learning as they went." I mutter, paw subconsciously drifting to that big ventral scar. "And they weren't real good at it. Made a few mistakes: that's why I'm so pretty and well-adjusted. So, yeah, they worked out early on that they didn't want to mess up my… my potential contributions to the future gene pool. I guess they figured once they got a few of us it would be cheaper to rub us together until we made more, that it was to build more from scratch. They never went through with it, cheap collagen 3D printing was easier than a breeding program but they, Errrm, they didn't want to mess with my junk at first because they thought they might need it down the line, as it were. But they also needed to fit me with a catheter, and given I've got a sheath and a penis bone down there, it was kind or awkward to fit one. Sooo… they kind of figured it was easier add an extra hole that went directly to my bladder and drain right off that, and added a port that interfaces directly with the... the reclamation systems of a standard Xandarian spacesuit." I say, hurrying to get the last bit out as fast as possible, because it embarrassing as all hell.

Thor stares. "What."

I feel myself blush under my fur, and hope it doesn't show in my ears. I snarl at him, masking my embarrassment with anger. "You deaf form the clap? I have a pee-port. I… I need you to check it ain't infected. "

"You have a….Ummm.."

"Yeah. I have an _ominous awkward pause ummm_. Looks like a large-bore headphone- jack socket. Silver plated to be as hygienic as possible. I just need you to check it ain't infected. I can reach it but I can't Erm… can't see down there."

"Down…."

"Under my tail." I mutter, wishing that the ground would just open up and swallow me. _Maybe that's Thanos's next trick._

"Under your…. _Seriously?"_

"Between my testicles and … bottom. Look this isn't funny! If you laugh-"

"This _isn't_ funny! Who'd laugh at something like this!" asks Thor.

 _Quill._ I think. _He found this the funniest thing in the world. Called it the teeny tiny tactical taint tap. Stars! The most embarrassing part of a body built by the lowest bidder, to test a concept, the single most awkward and hateful thing in a body made entirely of awkward and hateful things… and he could still get me to laugh about it. Oh, I bit him the first time, but he found it so funny he didn't care. Used to make it part of the ritual of dangerous space-walks: I laugh at him with his adult dippers or the pained face he pulls wearing a caterer, and I say he should go for something more convenient, and he'd just say convenience wasn't worth having a hole drilled into your nut sack's back yard._

 _I'm actually going to miss him._ I realise, as I lean back so Thor can actually check. _Fuck my life._

"No funny stuff! " I growl, lying flat on my back, propped up on one elbow, pointing at him as he finds a latex glove and pulls it on. "One _turn your head and cough_ joke and I'm taking that eye back!"

"Trust me Rabbit, this is by far the least funny thing I've done since they stopped writing sagas. Thank the Allfather there's no bards around to record this: I thought I got away with the crossdressing to get into that giant's wedding, but the paparazzi are everywhere on Jotunheim and... Oh… great. Just great, I've just seen your world-tree. That's, that's just great. Oh god, it's in my mind now, yep, that's in my mind now right next to the Hulks, and Elon Musk's… god Stark throws some wild parties…"

"Less sight-seeing! Never mind my world-tree, how's the dammed port?" I snarl. "And would it have killed you to warm up your hands first?"

There is an uncomfortable tug as he moves my tail around to get a better view, I get unceremoniously poked, and then he beats a very welcome hasty retreat.

"No, it's fine. No blood, no oozing. You're a little swollen, but other than that I guess it's for the want of a better word, normal."

Normal my ass: all this stress has thrown my hormones out of whack. My balls are probably twice their normal size and it's a miracle I'm not dragging myself glands-first over the carpet at this point, but I don't want him poking about any more than he wants to be there, so I sit up bloody quickly. Too quickly, I feel some of the bandages he's swaddled my upper torso with shift and pull, and boy, does its sting. I groan. I'm still feeling weak, and tired. Not hungry, my digestive system shut down a while ago, but tired.

"So other than his impressive _world tree_." I say, making quotation marks with my claws. "You reckon this Hulk or Banner or whoever will be able to help us retrofit this quin-jet to hunt wormholes?"

"Able, yes. Willing?" Thor shrugs, firing the latex glove across the room as he pulls it off. "It's not his to give. Cap' brought it, although whether he acquired it legally or took it without permission I don't know, but I'd imagine it's the property of the government of the United States of Vinland. What's more, due to the lack of Wakandan aircraft their interim government has requisitioned it. They lost a lot of their airpower in a failed coup d'etat months before the snap, which is why we lacked air support in that battle, Rabbit. It's in lockdown, on a landing pad at the top of the royal place. We'd also have to convince the Wakandan government to part with a considerable about of scientific equipment, most of it proprietary, and made of vibrainium. Given what I can grasp of their recent history, I doubt they'd be willing to part with it."

I scratch my chin. "Okay, so what do you reckon are the odds they'd just give it to us if we asked, explained why we needed it? As a percentage?"

"As a percentage? Ten to twenty: these people have never seen themselves as part of a greater galaxy. They even withdraw from their own small planet for their own security and comfort. The idea that a mission to Sakaar, a place they know nothing off, to retrieve a weapon whose powers they can't understand, on the off chance that we can use it on Thanos again… they need that quinjet here and now for dropping off humanitarian air for their own outlying settlements. Besides we're ummm… not the most popular of the Avengers right now. I failed to kill Thanos, and you're-"

"A freak, I know."

"- the guy who appeared once, then vanished to a hotel room to die alone. They won't take us seriously, sweet Rabbit."

We both pause as that sinks in.

"So we're stealing it." I say.

"We could still ask. If we explain, get Cap and Banner on our side-"

"No." I say, firmly. "If you assessment on how bad they need the damn thing is right, then all we do by asking is warn them that we need it, and they'll increase security. I don't want these heavily armed vibranium-happy chuckle-nuts to know what we're after until we're a dot on the horizon moving very fast away from their anti-air systems, if then. Asking nicely when we know there's no hope is a dumb move."

Thor grunted, and leaned back, peering out the bathroom door, checking that guards are a good way out of earshot.

"Agreed." He muttered. "I wish no ill will to these people, but I _need_ to get Stormbreaker back."

 _And I need to rob it off you to get Groot back._ I think. _Like you said, no ill will, buddy, but a mammal has needs._

"So what's the plan?" I ask, wondering the best way to steal from an actual god of thunder. _His defences will be lowest right after he's got it back. Probably best to hit him then, find an excuse to take hold of it then and there, and ditch with the Quinjet, leaving him on Sakaar. Harsh, but he's braved the area there before, apparently. Dick move, but he's a tough guy. He'll get over it._

Thor leans on this sink, rubbing his chin for a moment. "I don't know. theft, subterfuge, villainy… these are the traits of a lesser being without morals or honour, so I'm unfamiliar with them. No offence."

I grunt. "None taken: I just that shit down on my resume. But given I'm frickin working blind here anything you can do to help would be appreciated."

Thor snapped his fingers. "I know! We could do _get help!_ That one always works!"

"Get… what?" I ask.

"No, no it' really simple!" Thor says, gesticulating enthusiastically. "You pretend to be wounded and I carry you through the doors in my arms saying "Help! My Bother, he's dying!"

"Brother?"

"Friend, assistant, sidekick, whatever."

" _Sidekick!_ Why do I have to be the sidekick here?"

Thor stares. "Because I'm an immortal who controls lighting and you're a talking rabbit."

I pause, too tired to fight. "Okay, that fair I guess." I concede. I'm gonna rob him anyway. What does it matter what he calls me? "So I'm wounded and you carry me in."

"Ah, but you're not _really_ wounded, it's actually a most cunning deception. So I… where was I?"

"Help, My Bother, he's dying."

"Right, thank you… so, I yell _Help! My Bother, he's dying!_ Get help! And when they rush over to see what's happening and get help, then I throw you at them!"

I pause. "What."

"I throw you at them!"

"And then what?!" I sneer.

"And? I threw you at them! They'll be taken completely by surprise I –look, this is clearly too advanced for you to get right away, but trust me, it's a perfect plan. Never fails."

I stare. "Oaky, that can be plan B." I say, unwilling to confront that sheer continent straddling amount of stupidity head on. "But I was thinking more a lay out of the royal compound, the location of launch pad in the building, the location of a lab where we could get the kit we need to build a scanner, security codes, stuff like that…" I trial off, about to get sarcastic.

Thunder-stuck the wonder dog has picked up the discarded mirror he ripped off the wall, and is quickly and accurately sketching a rough floorplan in the condensation.

"I don't know all the security codes, only the one for the conference suite the Avengers are using and the perimeter ones to access the royal compound, but I do recall a few details of the buildings layout and… ah." He turns the mirror to me, smiling proudly.

There is a fantastically detailed floor by floor isometric plan of the main tower of the royal palace drawn in the mist, with useful annotations, written in Groot, of all languages. I take a memory and file it, instantly forming a good 3D mental mental map of the place, and mentally fog the areas where Thor is unsure of the layout.

"Oh my god." I mutter, reaching out to touch the misted mirror.

"It's okay, you can call me Thor." He jokes. "It's not as good as it could be, I've still only been in about a third of the building, but assuming the floor plans mirror themselves floor by floor as they appear to on publicly accessible levels, this is the most likely internal lay out. Turns out, after the first couple of hundred years, you get good at drawing from memory."

In nod, flabbergasted and not trusting myself to speak. "I… I can work with this." I admit, grudgingly. "Penmanship could do with some work, but given you were using your big fat fingers, I'll allow it." I say, quickly erasing the map with a towel, in case the guards notice.

Thor frowns at me.

"Don't you need to-"

"I got it." I reassure him. "I'll want to scope the place myself, but that's a start. You did good, dummy. Can you get me into the place for one of these Avenger meet ups?"

"Yes…. Once you're well." He says, firmly.

I groan. "I'm fine, I just need to-"

Thor pokes me with a single finger, very gently. I go ass over tit and fall off the toilet seat. I cuss, all four legs in the air, and try to roll over onto my stomach so I can grab the porcelain throne and pull myself upright, but I'm too tightly swaddled in towels and bandages to move much. I'm fricking stuck here, like a turtle on its back.

I glare at Thor. Specifically his ankles. "I will _break_ you for this." I warn.

"How, you're going to fall in front of me and trip me up?" he asks. I grunt, wiggle, and grunt again. shit, I'm actually stuck. This is my life now.

"You need a hand?" Thor askes, amused.

"No." I insist. "I can survive just fine down here licking the condensation from the toilet, thank you very much. I don't need anyone's hel- hey let go!" I yell. The fucker has grabbed me and picked me up. At least this time it's by the neck, and not the tail. I'm finally getting thought to this fucker. Yeah, I think as I dangle, I've sure shown him who's boss.

He holds me up at eye height and examines me like I'm the catch of the bloody day at a seafood market, and while I hiss and spit and bite, I'm completely powerless to do anything about it, and we both know it.

"If I drop you form this height, you'll break your legs, won't you? You can't bend or roll away the momentum in that swaddling, can you?" he asks.

"Doesn't matter, I've broken them before, I'm not afraid." I spit back at him. Thor sighs.

"You just don't know when to quit, do you?" he asks.

I don't rely. He smiled, grimly.

"you don't… I've chosen well: I was going to partner up with banner for this revenge mission, and while he's got the brains, and the Hulk has _all_ the brawn, I think I've made the right choice. You know why?"

"Why!?" I snarl.

Thor drops me.

I snarl, and twist, trying to catch his arm: it won't stop me dropping, but I can still claw the fucker, get a bite in when I pass his crotch maybe. Make him regret ever having-

He catches me with his other hand.

There is a pause, and we both break out laughing.

"You… you're insane!" I scream at him, heart doing three hundred beets a minuet, or about a hundred over what it should. It's just as well I've not eaten I days, or I would have pooped myself.

"Then we're well matched, Rabbit. Not many creatures will prioritize revenge over survival when falling from a height. No, I picked _very_ well. Come on, you can't stay here: I think this hotel suite is beyond saving. I have a more or less identical one on the next floor up, but I had them steal and extra bed from the family suite next door. I've got you clean and healed, now let get you fed and put to bed somewhere I can keep an eye on you… roommate."

I groan. "Can't you just drop me on the floor again?" I ask.

Thor laughs. Gods, the dumb fucker thinks I'm joking. And I'm too weak to even murder him in his sleep.

Fuck my life. Roommates? When did revenge become such hard work?


	4. Chapter 3, part 2: Sleepover

**Chapter Three: The Planning Stage, Part Two; Sleepover.**

Thor's room, to my total lack of surprise, is completely identical to mine, in the copy-paste manner of plush hotels the Galaxy over. Bathroom in the same space, mini-bar, huge black rectangle of a primitive imaging screen, and sofa in the pointless little reception area between the door of the suite and the bed and bath rooms. Same traditional Wakandan rug, same art on the walls, fuck: it even smells the same. Or at least, it smelt how my room did before I set fire to it, trashed it in a fight, and festered in a corner for a few days. There are only two appreciable differences. Well, three if you count that fact it's not grimy, on fire, flooded, and covered in bullet holes and feathers. One, the number of guards at the door has increased significantly, presumably because I trashed the last suite and may or may not have bitten off an ear in the elevator from my floor to Thor's. I mean, I didn't get a good look at how attached it was, but I had a good go at removing it because no-one manhandles me. Two, the fucker has actually snuck a second bed in, a narrow single, presumably looted from a family room in the hotel, or falling that an actual Wakandan family: I mean, half you're relatives have just dusted and he's an actual god, who's gonna frickin' stop him? And by narrow I mean, unlike my previous bed, I can see one side from the other without using satellite imagery and a rough map showing where this planet's equator runs across it. What is it with hotels trying to prove how fancy they are with their giant beds and correspondingly tiny bottles? Compensating for tiny dick syndrome, the lot of them, I think, adjusting myself nervously.

I did not want to make the journey up here wearing only towels, because it makes me hyper aware that if I have to flee the room in the night, I have to do it naked, and embracement aside, that's _severe_ a tactical disadvantage, which is why you always strip your prisoners when transporting high-risk bounties, boys and girls, assuming disabling their central nervous system or removing limbs is off the table. It saves so much trouble down the line. Speaking of trouble down the line/and-or stripping, the bed is wedged between Thor's king size, and the floor-to-ceiling window with a gap between the two of only inches, so it's basically one giant bed, and I hope that's not prophetic because the extra bed rammed in here and the scatter of empty beer bottles Thor's clearly got through makes this look like the set of a mid-price porno. Then again I lived nearly three years with Quill, and _'the set of a mind price porno'_ summed up his entire frickin' life, so who am I to judge? Maybe this is just how Terra always looks? A suspicion I get confirmed to my satisfaction the first time I get a look at your internet.

I glare around the room, panicking. Nope, it's two beds set up like a teen's sleepover. Or, given the lack of sleeping bags, drink flinched from the parental liquor cabinet or any girls, it's actually less a sleepover and more like the set up you'd have with two teenage male cousins sharing a room in the naive parental hope that they've not yet discovered masturbation or hard drugs. I mean, as far as I can tell from Quill's TV intercepts and horrifying personal stories, this is what a sleepover _would_ look like: I didn't get a bed as a child, or, for that matter a room, bedding, much in the way of sleep, or any friends, so in between electrodes to the brain and bi-weekly vivisection, sleepovers were one trauma I was mercifully spared. Go me.

Oh gods, he's actually serious about this. Is he? Oh fuck, he's smiling. He is. I'm trapped with a strange man, on a strange planet, sharing a bedroom with him and there are actual guards stopping me from leaving the room. And this time I didn't even rob a bank first and get sentenced to hard time like an honest shmuck. What sort of unconstitutional extrajudicial bullshit is this?

I fluff my fur and hiss aggressively because because I'm in no mood to play sleepover with the Asgardian equivalent of a golden retriever, but given he's carrying me in the crook of his arm like a grocery bag, I can't actually make a break for the door. Besides, I'm starting to feel like I may have lost my privileges to a free room elsewhere in the hotel. The local jail, maybe, but not here. You think with Thanos removing half of their previous bookings they might have a vacancy, but apparently no. And also, apparently it's way, way too soon for jokes about it, seein' as one of the guards burst into tears when I mentioned it.

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

Okay, so maybe it _is_ too soon… I shudder, then resume swearing my tits off and gnawing at Thor's biceps in the hope of escape. Thor, predictably, ignores my well-reasoned protests. I resolve to pee on his leg if given half a chance.

He doesn't give me the chance, depositing me on the bed almost in passing, as he does a full 360 sweep, looking for any potential weapons and then signalling for the Wakandan guards to remove them, one by one. _Yeah, you better be afraid blondie: last cell mate I had who was as big as you I had to cut on him early to establish dominance._ I think, nodding approvingly. It says something for my exhaustion and my unfamiliarity with the idea of him giving-a-crap about me, that I don't realise he's doing it to suicide-proof the room until he locks the windows and takes the key and conceals it under his cloak.

I glare at him, but he takes it while smiling faintly and pretending to not even notice.

"I'm not gonna top myself, idiot. I got unfinished business with the purple fucker."

"Oh, I believe you Sweet Rabbit, but it's just I've been wrong in my assessment of others before, so now I find it's better to take these precautions now, before someone's got a mistletoe dart though the eye, rather than later." He says, sitting on the edge of the bedside table, facing me, grinning a smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes. "And while I genuinely believe that a sober you would prioritise making other people suffer far, far above ending or decreasing your own suffering: you're far from well, malnourished, and I don't doubt you could easily, despite my best efforts, find yourself both strong liquor and weapons and do harm to yourself or others. Probably both. Definitely both."

"So" he says "Just as a, let's call this a courtesy rather than a precaution, I don't think you should be alone right now. It's not that I don't trust you…"

"Then what is it?" I glower.

"It's that I don't trust you." Says Thor, smiling flatly. I'm honestly flattered: it's the first thing he's said that _isn't_ batshit insane. As I re-assess his intelligence he continues.

"In your current state, I don't trust you to take care of yourself. And given I'm the one who crashed into your spaceship, lured you and Tree away from your family: Gamora, the bald one, antennas and the tiny man with envy issues, and got you into this whole sorry saga or fighting Thanos; that makes getting you well again my responsibility. You fought for me, and took a wound in my service, albeit an emotional rather than physical one. My father made sure if a man shed his blood for Asgard, be he Lowy Thrall, or loyal sworn Huascarl, then as king he owed it to that man to see to his care the best he could. I have a duty of care. So here we are. Stuck here. On earth. Sharing this hotel room." Said Thor, while I glare at him and it slowly sinks in that I'll find a way to make him hate this every bit as much as I do.

"Yayyyy." He said, waving both hands with mock joviality.

Yep. I'm gonna stab him, I realise. I've spent enough time in prison with cellmates who wanted to either kill, steal from me, or violently deprive me of any and all innocence my body might have in theory ever had, but this, this crosses a line. This fucker is trying to _help me._ That's a threat that can't be borne.

Shank made out of a comb, I think. Beard that neat, he must have a facial hair comb somewhere in the room. Hell, Imagine if it got out that I needed help? From this dumb sack of shit? My remaining street cred would be in the gutter, and my rep only just recovered from after that time Quill put that holo of me dancing when very very drunk out on the outer net. You get help from someone, one, it means you're weak and everyone knows it, and two, it puts me in his debt. And by definition anyone who spends effort to put you in their debt is someone you most definitely _do not_ want to be indebted too. I've worked for too many mobsters to fall for that shit.

I mean, it's not like he actually cares about me. Right? I mean... look at me. He just needs me to find his axe for him, and I want to then rob it off him. Simple explanation: Mutual self-interest, let's not stank up this sweet arrangement with a whole bunch of feelings or complications.

Wait, he actually said _Yayyyy?_ Oh fuck, Thanos, snap me now, I think, as a settle cross-legged on the bed and glare.

"You better fucking fetch my stuff."

"Stuff?"

"My gun, my toolbelt, my power-pack. My clothes, once they dry."

Thor stands up and paces, rubbing his chin and part-grinning part grimacing in that way people do when they get outrageous demands they have to meet.

"Not the gun…. not now, not in the hotel. Yes to the clothes and pack… I'll see about the toolbelt."

 _Once you loot it of everything I need to make my escape. One you remove any sharp objects you feel nervous about me having._ I think. _Coward: so you want to stop me killing myself? Where's the challenge in stopping an_ _ **unarmed**_ _guy from offing himself? Give him some grenades, then that's a fair fight._

This is why my career as ships councillor on the _Milano_ didn't last long. That and me gaslighting Drax out of sheer boredom. The trick is to hide a toaster in their room on a timer, and then deny to them you can smell toast. Instant hilarity.

Thor waves the Guards away, telling them to fetch my stuff, and the door closes. Oh shit, I'm trapped, I think.

Thor sits on the bed near me. I scowl, and move into a corner as far as I could get from him. I still don't trust the fucker, simple as.

"You need rest, Rabbit. And food. What do you eat? I could summon one of the many and interesting Terran dishes: they don't have Grox here, or aurochs anymore, but they have this stuff called 'toasted French' that's really good…"

I glower, and cut in. "I'm fine." I hiss. "Just need some space, yanno?" I ask. He doesn't leave the room. Shit, that was too subtle a hint for the big fucker. "Some space alone." Too subtle. "Away from you." Still too subtle. "So fuck off." I add.

Thor, remarkably, does not fuck off. He just looks and me, and frowns.

"When was the last time you ate, Rabbit? And don't say on the flight to Nidavellir or I will be justifiably upset: Judging by your small size and high body temperature I'm guessing you have a very fast metabolism, you should not go even moderate periods without eating."

I glare. "Technically I ate that aspirin…"

Thor groans, and he pinches the bridge of his nose. "Rabbit, you were in that room for nearly a week, and you're telling me you didn't eat?"

"Well, I spewed up my booze a couple of times. That's kind of like eating in reverse…"

Thor stands. "I'm calling room service." He declares, like there will be no argument. I groan, and pitch in.

"Hey, hey hey hey! Roid-rage, you ever dealt with someone once their body has entered starvation mode? Actually properly? You can't just chuck them a sandwich, numb-nuts, ya gotta go slow and careful or you're gonna hurt them more. I'm stable right now, my body will have shut down most unnecessary systems to save energy, including my digestive tract. You give me food I'm gonna do nothing but spew violently from both ends, and given we're sharing a room, I doubt you want that any more than I do! And that's' the best case scenario, sometimes people can just… die. You gotta start slow. Rehydrate, get some glucose and vitamins in to start, then move up to very, very small amounts of easily digested food!"

He stares, head cocked on one side. I pre-empt his question, just as his lips move.

"I was in a war once."

"That's… that's not an answer Rabbit. I've been in war many times."

I glare. "You ever bin' on the losing side, pal?"

"Well, up until Thanos, no."

"Yeah well, things went about for me soldiering as they went for me in everything else. You go long enough without rations you learn a thing or to…" I shudder, trying to drive memories of the Toy War and Halfworld from my mind. "But yeah, if someone's not had a feed for a good long time, you'll be doing them no favours by just ordering them a pizza."

Thor nodes, and goes to the door and speaks to the guards, a turn an ear to follow him, and eavesdrop as discreetly as possible. I mean not that I care if he knows I'm listening in, I ain't no shrinking violet… but I'd like to keep exactly how good my senses are from him for just a while. You know… just in case.

"… Orange juice. Glucose tablets, or glucose-dextrose tablets, whatever you have. A multi-vitamin wouldn't hurt, something with iron, his lack of energy may indicate he's slightly anaemic…"

"He's also slightly sober!" I yell. "Beer would not go amiss!" Thor turns and glares, but does not answer me.

"Just blend it all and put in a glass, would you?" he says, before turning back to me and eyeing me appraisingly.

"You appear to be correct, the guards agree that 'refeeding syndrome' is indeed a thing, and it's made worse by alcohol abuse. They, too, recommend small sips of glycose, or fruit juices, and a mineral supplement. Do you have any allergies that I should know about?"

"Idiots. Cops. Sobriety. The usual. Oh, and it's not technically an allergy, but chocolate will kill me. Other than that I can eat basically anything."

Thor winces, which I hate. Yeah, I know not being able to eat chocolate sucks, I don't need reminding, but he waves the guard away and pulls the door closed.

"Apparently death from re-feeding syndrome occurs due to serum electrolyte imbalance, and it usually strikes within four to eight days…"

"For terrans, maybe. It happens faster with… with things like me." I say, thinking back "We called it the 48 hour drop: about two days after they started eating again, they'd get confused and develop an irregular heartbeat. Some would slip into a coma, some would just… die."

Thor looks to me, and sighs.

"You've had a hard time of it, haven't you Rabbit?"

I scowl. I'm in no mood for sympathy.

I'm about to say something brilliant and witty and no doubt totally cutting, I'm sure, when there's a knock at the door, and Thor opens it. Fuck me, those Wakkandan's move fast when you order room service, which makes me instantly suspect that Thor had got a whole bunch or food lined up before he dragged me out of my room. He's not a dumb as he looks, which is just as well because that would probably require specialised brain-reduction surgery. The trolley that comes in is so disgustingly neat and clean I want to burn it down in self-defence of my scruffy masculine pride: starched white table cover with embodied Wakandan design along the borders, traditional tribal ceramic with a fucking flower arrangement in it, and fucking _Champagne flutes_ of a bright yellow liquid. I don't know what Champagne actually is, but I've watched enough Terran TV intercepts with Quill to know that those stupid long-steamed tall, narrow glasses are a high-status item, used to display how much richer you are than the other plebs. I eye the glasses with a mix of wary trepidation, and thoughtful planning: that long glass stem could make a _really_ good shank.

That said, there is something very wrong with the drink.

"They made it wrong." I declare.

"I'm sorry?" asks Thor.

"They fucked up your order. Frickin' Terrans couldn't even get a simple request right. You asked for _orange_ juice, that's clearly yellow." I say, cocking my head on one side. I can't actually see the colour orange, it looks brownish-grey to me, but Thor don't need to know that, and that glass is clearly yellow. I nod sagely. "They probably forgot to put the red-juice in." I guess. I don't want to sound stupid, so I go for the simplest possible explanation. "Yeah, cheapskates are trying to do you out of the red juice, that probably costs extra, if you want two primary colours. You should punch them." I advise, nodding wisely.

It's clearly good advice, as it makes Thor pause, confused, before he shakes his head and takes the trolley from the guard and the guards retreat into the corridor an close the door. Yeah, you better run you red-stealing bastards. I'm on to you!

Thor hands me the first glass, there are several, and I'm immediately tempted to stab him with it. I sniff at it suspiciously. It smells way, way to sweat, and I feel it turn my stomach at just the smell of it. Shit, it's been too long since I ate; something as simple as this shouldn't phase me, but the mere idea of having anything more than water makes my paws sweat and body shake. Oh man, I'm far gone, I realise, sniffing very, very cautiously. Unfamiliar fruit, sweet and slightly tart. They've added maybe a five gram glucose-dextrose tablet to it, and a vitamin B and mineral supplement, but I keep sniffing suspiciously, and the thing I'm searching for just isn't there.

"Hey what gives!" I protest, thrusting the glass back at Thor. "What's with the tranquilisers?!"

"I… Rabbit, there aren't any tranquilisers!"

"Exactly! What sort of shitty mom and pop planet is this were you don't even take the chance to tranquilise the dangerous potentially suicidal prisoner when you've got the chance? Am I a fucking joke to you? I'm crazy, pissed off and barely house-broken, and you _don't_ dope me to oblivion when you get the chance? You fucking _amateurs!_ I am so disappointed with you! This is basically prejudice, you know, I bet if Warmachine or one of the humanoids was in my state, you'd have drugged him until he could smell colours, you shmuck!"

"I… wait, How would you have reacted if it _had_ been drugged?"

"I'd have stabbed you in the dick with the glass, but at least I'd have respected your integrity as I did it, you moron!" I yell.

"I… Rabbit, do you _want_ to be tranquilised?"

"No, because I'm pretty sure if I did I'd either end up strapped to a dissection table or as a notch on someone's bedpost, but I at least _expect_ that! The lack of drugging makes me think you've got something worse planned!"

"I… you are paranoid Rabbit!"

"That is true!"

"And distrustful and violent!"

"That is also true!" I snarl.

Thor throws up his hands in exasperation, then thrusts the juice back at me.

"Drink you're damn juice Rabbit!"

I thrust it back. "I don't want it! They stole all the red out of it!"

"That doesn't make any sense!"

"No, _you_ don't make any sense!"

He hands me the juice, and then puts a small tablet on the bed next to it. The capsule looks hilariously out of place next to the hotel's mints, like a turd in a punchbowl. A fart at a funeral. A cyborg racoon and a thunder god sharing a hotel roo- _oh wait._

"Fine," says Thor, nodding to the capsule "I was thinking about drugging you, but I decided not to go thought with it because you're my friend, even if you're a really, really bad friend!"

"You bet I am!" I say, standing up on the bed, so I can face him at an equal height, ears back and teeth bared.

"That's not something you boast about!" he says, raising his hands. "Just drink you're damn juice!"

"Or what?!" I yell.

"Or you'll starve to death and we'll never get our bloody vengeance!" he shouts.

I stare back, inches from his face, panting.

"Okay, that's a fair point." I growl. I look down: Thor has held the cup back up to me.

I take it in both paws, and, scowling, sit back down. I hesitate: this is the first step in getting well again. In choosing to live. In choosing to live _without_ Groot.

I wince at the idea, fuck, I'm actually committing to vengeance over mourning?

Yes, I am, I realise.

I drink the damn drink.

It's not actually bad: I thought it would be sickly sweet, but it smells sweater than it is. It's got a good level of sourness to it. Like me, I guess.

I sip, and pause. It's not bad at all. I take some more.

I suddenly realise how damn thirsty, hungry and tired I am. I drain the fucker. Thor has to hold the glass, to stop me downing it in one.

"Whoa, whoa, easy Rabbit. Don't make yourself sick. Go slow."

"Bite me." I mutter, juice dripping down my chin, but he's got a point, I guess. I go slow, sipping gently for the rest of the glass, and most of the next two as well.

After that, I have to stop, feeling full and bloated, and sticky. My stomach has shrunk, and three cups of juice feels like draining an ocean.

I rub at my stomach. "Ugg, drank that too fast." I mutter, handing the glass back to Thor, distractedly. Shit, I realise, I didn't even try to make a shank out of that glass. Must be going soft in my old age.

Oh well, I think, scanning the bed, and pocketing what I need as Thor's back is turned, when he puts the glasses back on the trolley, and wheeles it back out. You spend as long as I have in prison, the question isn't "Could I make a weapon and or booze out of that?" but " _How_ could I make a weapon and or booze out of that?" That, or you find someone bigger than you to cosy up to for protection, something I fully recommend: my relationship with Groot was basically father/son with me looking out for him, but I'm not going to deny that at times having the muscle on hand was useful when I came to the whole boring, mundane _'surviving without getting buttfucked, shanked or driven insane'_ side of things.

I hide the ingredients of the shank under my towels before Thor looks back, and I'm wondering what excuse I'll use to sneak away from him for a moment to make the weapon, when the door knocks, and thank the stars, it's exactly what I needed.

"Odinsson: the items you asked for." Says a Wakandan guard, walking in and, without even looking at me, placing my now dried clothes on the end of the bed. The fuckers pressed them, I notice. They fucking pressed them: the universe is not a big enough place to store the stick up your butt if you think you have time to _press_ a racoon's undies, nerds. My gun isn't included, I note. Nor my tools or power-backpack, but it's a start.

"Okay, I'm full and tired." I declare, examining my underwear which has been starched and pressed so neatly I could practically cut myself on it, with a despairing shake of the head. "I wanna change back into my clothes and get some shut eye." I say, standing up and taking my stuff. I glare. "You mind? I'm changing here: I'd like some privacy!" I say, nodding to the door of the suite.

Thor glares, as I know he would. "I think not, sweet Rabbit, I can't trust you alone just yet…"

"So what, you're gonna ogle me as I change? One look at me naked wasn't enough for you, huh? Frickin pre-vert!"

"Why don't you change in the bathroom?" he asks, standing up. "And I'll just wait here, just on the other side of the door from you."

I smile, faintly. This was the plan: this way he don't suspect. I wanted to get in the bathroom alone, but if _he_ suggests it, well, that's half his defences down already. I pick up my clothes, over ironed, and walk in wearing nothing but a towel. Hell, I've been to enough prisons, this is normal for me.

Once in there, I run scurry up the side of the marble, and run the taps to create a nose that will cover me as I work. Also, I need hot water for this: spit works okay for what I'm making, but it's faster with hot water.

"Hey, morons, can I get a toothbrush?" I ask, more to keep Thor distracted than anything. "You're removed the one from this room"

"No."

I snort. "Why not? You're the one who seems to care so damn much about my hygiene!"

"Because I strongly suspect you'll stab me with it." He says, not realising I'm melting hard-candy and gluing it to a comb as he speaks "But I'll see about getting you some of that mouthwash." He adds, as I try to gnaw the sugar into a sharp point.

"You do that." I mutter, mouth full, looking around as I work. Thank fuck for fancy hotels and their weird insistence on putting candy on the pillows. Not much else here I could use as a weapon. Can't even poop on the shank to make it infectious because I've not eaten in over a weak. Oh well, you make do with what you've got. I work on the shank for as long as I dare, hide it as Thor opens the door an inch to pass the mouthwash, and then take a handful of water and very slowly trickle it into the toilet bowl so it sounds like I'm peeing. That grabs be another few minutes to gnaw the candy/comb hybrid into a point, and start licking it sharp, like you can do with a candy-cane. After the fake peeing, I then have an excuse to wash my paws, buying me more time. I milk the entire process for close to twenty minutes, humming and switching on an off taps so it sounds like I'm washing. Not long enough to make a good candy shank from scratch, but these Wakandans were kind enough to leave me with an afro-comb with long plastic spikes as a starting chassis, so all I got to do is break off all but one or two spikes in line with the handle, and glue hard-candy to that and smooth it down into a decent point. I finish adjusting the grip to fit my paw, and tuck the shank into the back of my body-glove, near my shoulders, where I can draw it fast. I have no doubt it wouldn't hurt Thor, not really, and to be honest I have no intention of using it, but It makes me feel a lot better just to have it.

Holy shit, what the fuck does that even say about me?

I use the mouthwash for real, and flush the toilet to dispose of the comb teeth I broke off to make the shank, and any other evidence. I then check myself in the mirror.

Well, I look like crap, but then again, what did I expect?

Shuddering, I open the door. I'm tired, and feel weirdly full on my three and a bit glasses of juice, but I don't trust Thor not to do something while I sleep. I don't know what, exactly, but I don't trust him. I don't trust myself. I don't trust no one, not since The Snap.

Growling, I crawl up onto his bed, walk across it, deliberately dragging my foot scent-glands on his pillow because fuck him, and walk to my bed. I put my back to the window, ruck-up all the bedding into a nest there, and grab two pillows: one for my head, one to hold in front of me like a shield, between him and me. I hide the shank under that pillow, close to hand.

I scowl. The set up of the beds means he's between me and the rest of the room, a deliberate attempt on his part to stop me sneaking off in the night to, I don't know, hurt myself or something. But it also means I'm cornered, boxed in, and I don't like it. Not only does it remind me too much of prison, but it sets off earlier memories. Of the lab, of the little box that was my entire world for so much of my early life. Of the fuckers there and how their fucked me up for life with their experiments. I don't like being boxed in.

But it's not just that. Groot ain't here. Before, in the other hotel room, I didn't sleep so much as passed out. This… this will be the first time I've _intentionally_ gone to bed without Groot nearby in about half of my adult life.

And it's terrifying.

I snarl, fluffing up, trying to look big. "Okay, muscles, let's get some ground rules established here. One, no touching, no moving, no intrusions. This? This is _my_ bed: _anything_ crosses over that divide from your bed to mine, I cut it off. Agreed?"

"Understood, Rabbit. I'll respect your space."

"Good. Two, I don't know if Asgardians work the same way as terrans, but having had a rude awakening from Quill that one time we all had to share a sleeping bag to avoid freezing solid, so a helpful warning: you get morning wood, and I'm cutting that off too."

"Seriously Rabbit? I-"

"Hey, I'm not being unreasonable." I state. "But it's just that I think of other people erections the same way I think about the fucking _sun_ : I understand that scientifically speaking, they're necessary for the continuation of mammalian life, but I don't want to look directly at them and also want to keep them about one astronomical unit away from me at all times. Understood?"

"Three." I cut in, not letting him answer. "I… I ain't _normal._ Not at the best of times, which this ain't. So you stay here, that means you take whatever weird shit that entails: screaming, trashing, biting, snot, tears, fleas… you chose this, so you have no right to complain about it, and you _never_ speak of this, understood. I… I don't cope well at _existing,_ not even when I'm awake and in control, so don't expect a restful night if you choose to stay here."

Thor folds his arms, and nods.

I nod back. He goes to the bathroom, pees and washes: I can hear and smell him well enough to pinpoint his exact position, and then he comes back, and, thankfully fully clothed, takes the bed opposite from me, about as far from me as he can get and still be technically in the room, and turns off the light. I can still see him just fine, arms folded on top of the covers, staring right up. Mismatched eyes open.

I watch him for a long moment, studying him with my superior night vision and sense of smell and hearing, eyes narrowed curiously. Who is this man? And why is he pretending to care about me? What's his Endgame? He wants his axe back, sure, and he's just using me to get it, right? So… if that's the case, then it means in justified and in no way a dick for planning to rob it from him, right? I ain't the bad guy here, so, ergo, he must be. Logic, right?

He doesn't look much like the bad guy, I concede. Shit, he's even got tears in his eyes.

I duck down, afraid, faking sleep; if he's planning far enough ahead to fake tears in the pitch dark just in case I can see, he's clearly way smarter than I took him for.

We both lie there in the dark for a long time, pretending to be asleep because neither of us trusts the other, each with tears in our eyes. Oh gods, how I wish Groot was here…

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

I Dream.

I'm on the _Benitar_ , and all my friends are there, even the ones who shouldn't be, who were never on the _Benitar,_ who died or left me before I even met the Guardians of the Galaxy; Brock, Stella, Reynard, the whole squad from the Toy War, Lylla is sitting on my left, snuggling up to me; I can feel her warmth, smell clean otter fur. Quill is sitting opposite me, Gamora half on his lap, mirroring Lylla snuggling up to me. Drax is next to him, on his right, Mantis on his left. We're having a meal, a celebration, he pours wine, topping up my glass. Sweat and red. I know I can't see red… but in the dream I can, it a stronger colour than I ever imagined. It's the colour of a trapped soul.

I reach for the glass, and a tendril takes it, and hands it to me.

Groot is there, sitting behind me. He hands me my wine, and lays a hand on my shoulder. He's strange: both the old Groot who died to save me, and the new one born from the wreckage at the same time, and I feel a fierce, burning love for the both of them, and such _relief._

For a second there I could have almost sworn that something bad had happened to him…

I Smile, and raise my glass in a toast.

"I…" I'm so happy I don't know what to say. Everyone in this room loves me, for who I am, even after they know what an awful shit I am. What do you even say to that?

"I… to family!" I say, raising my glass.

It turns to ash, and crumbles in my hands.

I stare at my paw stupidly for a moment, and I'm so shocked I don't even notice at first when Reynard sighs and fold up on the table, crumbling to dust, his glass rolling out unscathed. Sudden, random, uncalled for, no last words, just… gone.

It starts.

I turn to look. Bock, his striped face swells, his throat bloated, eyes bulging like he was when that nerve gas took him on Halfworld. He claws at his throat, but rather than blood, ash spills out, and he's gone in seconds. Stella's beautiful fur has crisped to a burnt grey, and she heaves, but instead of having her lungs popping out, like how she actually went when that fuel air bomb hit, she pukes up dust, right into the disintegrating celebratory meal, and then she she dusts too.

Lylla sighs, once, and then melts into my fur, gone.

Mantis giggles and dusts. Drax yells, defiantly, reaching out to her, but vanishes, crumbling before me, yelling. "No! no, we were meant to stop Thanos! We were meant to… this is on us! We-"

He's gone. The room dusts around me. The _benitar_ is gone, and we're all just floating in space, opposite each other, just standing in a circle like a bunch of doomed idiots.

Gamora looks over, more sad than angry. "I warned you. I warned what father would do. We needed to stop him. Us. You. We needed to do better, Rocket, we needed you to be bet-" her face is breaking up, she's outlined with ash, and then she falls, suddenly, thought the floor, trailing ask like a comet through space. It's such a long drop, but I still see her hit, and break apart into ash.

Quill, my best friend looks over, more confused than sad or angry. "Oh, Man." He says, and then explodes into dust, covering me with it.

I'm screaming, I realise, screaming because I know what comes next.

I turn to Groot, grabbing at him, panicked. I just want to get a hold of him, one last time. Is that too much to ask? I just want to _hold_ my son!

Clumps of him come of in my paws, dusting as I take them. He doesn't look pained, only sad, confused, and frightened. Oh gods, he's so frightened! No!

He holds out an arm to me, reaching out. I reach back, but just as I'm about to grab it, it snaps off, and falls to the ground before me, with a clang.

I look down. It's an axe. _Stormbreaker._

I hear the footsteps behind me, slow and heavy, and I turn.

Thanos, walking over the stars as easy as he did the red dirt of Wakanda, glove glowing.

I panic, pushing Groot back, telling him to get behind me. I have to shield my son! I need to fight him, I need a gun, a bomb, a weapon, any weapon I-

The Avengers start attacking him, one at a time. Like they did that day. He walks on, beating them one at a time, drawing closer in slow motion, like a bad dream. He's approaching, but this time, its not Vison and Wanda, it's me.

He's coming for my son.

I never fought him when he did this for real; I was too busy keeping the fleas off the Avengers' backs, shooting outriders. I… I did nothing. And we all paid. My son paid.

Not this time.

I glower, and grab Stormbreaker, the one bit of my son I can touch without him crumbling. I'm standing on a circular platform of dust falling through space, and Thanos walks up calmly, down a narrow path of grey dust painted through the stars. Banner, Black Widow, some guy dressed as a cat, Warmachine, he brushes them all off. The one they call Cap is running at him. The last one, before he gets to his victim. The only one who even _stalled_ him. I need to act now, I realise. Thor said wielding this weapon would kill me, crush mind and body. But I need to save my son!

I Grab Stormbreaker, and I lift.

It falls, taking me, Groot and the ground with it. I feel the air rush up through my fur. The pain wracks me. I can feel the weapon disintegrating me from the inside, like the Power Stone did back on Xandar. But I can't give up. I yell, swearing and sweating, terrified and hurt, and I try to lift the axe.

I can't. I can't make it budge an inch. I can't lift it! Why can't I lift it?

Thanos tosses Cap aside. Thor comes down out of the sky onto him, trying, but without the axe, without my help, he's not going to do it. He's not going to stop him. I have to lift the axe! I need to save my son I-

I can't lift it, straining though I am. I can't

I'm too weak.

Thanos's shadow falls over me. I see him reflected in Groots staring eyes.

I turn.

He looks down on me, a giant, a god, he could just step on me and crush every bone in my body without trying. Squash me like a bug. He raises a foot.

I snarl, and grab the axe. This is it, the bit were I finally fight to save my son all I need to do is _lift_.

But I don't. I can't. And I finally realise why:

I'm not worthy.

The foot comes down, besides me. Thanos has again spared me, for the worse of two fates: not death, but having to _watch_ death. I let go of the axe and reach for my son, one last time.

Miles above me, Thanos snaps his fingers.

* * *

I wake screaming.

The world comes back. I'm nestled in the crook of Quill's arm. Not unusual: I often fall asleep in weird places on ship and he picks me up and puts me back in bed, so I wake up like this sometimes when he's moving me. He's a good guy like that-

Wait, Quill's dead.

I wake fully.

I have less than a second to deal with the growing horror and embarrassment. Here's the deal:

Thor is waking up, because I've just screamed and dug all four sets of claws into him. It's pretty clear from context what's happened: I've had a bad dream and subconsciously moved to somewhere warmer and safer in my sleep to try and get some contact comfort. Specifically, I've wiggled over to his bed and snuggled up to Thor's chest, hiding between his arm and his side. While both of us are asleep. And without either of us realising until this point. I guess that explains the dream of Lylla snuggled so close to me…

Oh boy, I'm going to have to handle this really _carefully_ to avoid life-long embarrassment.

I decide to go in strong, and shank Thor in the thigh. No defence like a good offence.

Thor, understandably, screams and jolts back, falling off the bed. I take the opportunity to scurry back into a corner, and pretend that's where I've been the whole time.

"Ahhhhh! Rabbit, what the _Hel!?_ By the Allfather's beard-!"

"Quit Trying to grope me!" I yell, trying to keep him off balance.

"I… what? You were groping me, Rabbit! You were curled up on my chest!"

"Liar, quit victim shaming, you pre-vert!" I snarl, wavering my shank in a defensive pattern in front of him.

"I'm not… I wasn't…. _where the Hel did you get a knife from?"_

This wasn't the question I expected, and it throws me off track.

"Oh, this Um…. They put mints on the pillow. I found a comb in the bathroom and melted all the mints to it and licked it sharp. Made a handle of toilet paper and Band-Aids from the bathroom shaving kit. Why, do you like it?"

"Given that you've stabbed me in the leg with it, no!" yelled Thor, sitting on the side of the bed, and checking himself for a lasting puncture wound. Unfortunately, with those tough Asgardian muscles, I've barely scratched him. I bare my teeth and brandish the broken shank a bit more, partly to stop him asking why I was spooning him, partly to discourage him trying to take the shiv off me.

He frowns, rubbing his thigh. "I did wonder where the mints had gone. Allfather! Why don't they use chocolates like other Terran hotels? Some form of confections that you _can't_ weaponise?"

"Okay, one, I'd find a way, pal. And two. Chocolate on the pillow in a tropical country? It'd just melt onto the sheets!"

"This room has air-conditioning!" yells Thor, still pissed he's been woken by a shank to the knee, which is fair enough I guess.

I snarl "Force of Habit! In the tropics they keep their chocolate in refrigerators habitually, check out the mini bar!"

"I don't want to check out the mini bar, we already emptied the mini-bar: I just want you not to stab me in my sleep!" he yells.

"Then stay on your side of the bed!"

"I was!" he yells.

"Then stay in _my_ side of the bed when I decide I want _yours!"_

"I… what?"

"Hey, I said I was weird! You gotta just roll with it! This is what you get!"

"I… Rabbit, If you need to talk… if you need a hug even I…"

I fluff up and hiss. "Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off! Less of that talk, that's how rumours start. I… I was having a moment. Must have gone to sleep funny on my leg, lost circulation and rolled over. Perfectly sensible explanation for how I ended up on your side of the bed. Beds, plural. Okay?"

He stares sullen, but after a moment nods.

"Okay, let's say that, if you need that, Rabbit."

I really, really do, but I don't want to say that, so I just snarl. Thor sighs, put upon.

He stares at me me for a good long time, I back up farther into the corner, wiggling my tail right into the glass of the window and bracing my feet against it, ready to spring. I know, deep down, that he's not about to attack me, but the guy is glaring at me for a _long_ time, and the dude is, and I'll never repeat this in his hearing, fucking _intimidating_. I mean, not only is he an actual god, but when he's this close to you and just glaring, he's kind of intense. I brace, feeling that I've gone too far: stabbing him was a calculated risk to distract him from why I was curled up on his arm; if he realises how emotionally weak I am right now, he'll never trust me, and I'll never get that axe. I'd rather he think I'm crazy that thinks I'm weak: he needs crazy to get Stormbreaker, he has no use for weakness.

After a moment, Thor grunts, and walks to the door. I tense up, thinking he's about to call the guards and kick me out, thinking that I've screwed up my one chance of getting that last chunk of Groot back… but to my surprise, and resultantly my instant suspicion, he comes back in wheeling the room service trolley: he must have had it parked right outside the door, and hands me another glass of juice. I hesitate, glaring suspiciously, before I dart out and stanch it.

"Small sips, Rabbit. You're still in actual medical danger." He says, giving me space and sitting back on the edge of his bed. He glares at the bed and without any sign of effort picks it up. A king-size, tropical hardwood-frame bed, and he balances it on his hand like a pizza box. How strong is this guy? And holy shit, forget strength, how good is his balance if he can do that? This guy could pick up frickin' cars! He re-positions the bed: still close enough to mine to keep an eye on me, and in a position the keeps him between me and the exit, but far enough away that I can get to the bathroom without walking over him. A clear sign: he's giving me just a little of my own space, but only a little. He sits on the edge, facing me, and sighs.

"I would take the glass back from you, but given you managed to make a weapon out of the complementary candy, I see now trying to prevent you arming yourself is… well, as futile as trying to prevent me arming _my_ self. Keep the glass, if you need more juice, take it from the trolley. I'll get you that toothbrush you asked for in the morning, too, and try to get you a good vibrinium hunting knife. They should have those here, if nowhere else."

I look at him, stunned, the effect only slightly ruined by the fact I have a juice moustache on my whiskers: It's a little warm, but still good. He notices, and smiles back grimly, rubbing at his leg.

"If you're going to stab me, I'd sooner not have bits of sugar breaking of and festering in the wound." He says, half joking.

I grunt, but I don't argue. Not when he's trying to give me cool stuff. He does, however, raise a hand.

"You, however, don't _hide_ any more weapons from me, agreed? You wear that knife openly, where I can see it, and If you go to the privy or anywhere else I can't see you, you leave it where I can see it, or you give it to me. No more secrets, no more surprises: I arm you, so you can feel safe because you clearly need that for some reason, but you don't take that blade anywhere you might harm yourself without me seeing, nor do any other mischief. Do we have a deal?" he asks.

I snarl, but I don't argue, and after a moment I nod in the most sullen way I can manage. It's not the deal I wanted, but at least this way I'm armed and besides, I don't plan to hurt myself anyway. Other people, yes, but not me. I'm past that: I mean come on; I stopped trying to drink and starve myself to death … like…. _nine_ hours ago, get over it.

He nods back, and regards me for a moment.

"Anything else you need, Rabbit? If I can, I will provide."

A thousand and one jokes and witty/smutty /rude come backs come to mind, but I hold them down, and consider. Is there anything I can milk out of him? Something to give me an edge? Failing that, is there genuinely anything else I need right now?

 _(…Wooden hand reaching out even as it crumbles, look of fear in his face….)_

I shudder. "You still got that tranquiliser?" I ask, indecently fast.

Thor nods "It's still on the pillow, Rabbit." He says, gesturing to it with his head.

I look down at it, and bite my lip

"What shit is that, anyway? For all I know-"

Thor gets out a primitive communicator, and activates it, showing a flat, backlit image of a molecular diagram. The drug is, plus or minus a functional group, the same as the one sold on Nova worlds under the brand name _soma lite._ Less habit forming that it's big brother, and one that will not only _not_ kill me, but will actually work to put me out. Like, super out, that dosage is calibrated for a Terran. It'll be safe, but I'd basically lose a day, and be groggy as shit after.

Then again, given the alternative…

I frown, and make a choice " Okay... Gods, I don't want to be sober anyhow. Just promise no weird shit while I'm out!"

Thor pinches his nose, and grimaces. When he speaks it's in that stupid condescending tone people use when they're trying to be understanding.

"Rabbit, I understand you've spent a long time in prison, and I'm flattered, but I do _Not_ think of you in that way. I mean, not to boast, but the size difference alone... I'd kill you Rabbit! You'd be cleft in twain! I-"

"Well, that's one horrifying mental image that will never leave, Thor, thank you. I mean-"

"You're welcome." Says Thor, sincerely,

I glare "I meant, that's not what I was afraid of. It's... Hell, it's not you, it's doctors. I'm worried I pop this, in gonna wake up strapped to a table somewhere with my spleen in a jar. I've seen Terran movies with Quill, I know what they did to that poor _Akira_ kid!"

Thor pats my arm, in a way I guess is meant to be a reassuring manner, but in fact just makes me want to stab him again. "Fret naught, Rabbit, I have been to Terra many times, and I'm sure there's no truth to that ' _alien dissection',_ Area 51, trope they're famous for."

I blink, three times in rapid succession. "Wait, they're famous for _what_ now?"

"Oh, you know: cutting up aliens, really gory stuff too all _Ohhh! Ak! Arrggg! Blegh!_ But it's all fake. I mean that entire Roswell thing: I've been to New Mexico, Rabbit, and it was just fine... Sure Shield locked me in a cage, stole my hammer and I destroyed a small town, but that's water under a bridge that I've already burnt, as the Terran saying goes. I mean other than the Sakaaran's from the Battle of New Jorvik an maybe the odd Kree on ice, I'm pretty sure terrans don't even _have_ that many dead aliens _to_ cut up."

I'm left blinking nervously for some time. "Oh. Goody." I eventually say.

Thor sits back on his bed, and smiles, humourlessly. "Don't worry Rabbit, I'll look out for you. Its… it's the least I owe you after Nidavellir. You and Groot got me my axe, and in doing so saved my life. Rest: I'll watch over you. And besides, after what happened to Colonel Rhodes, even if they feel like a little late night vivisection I doubt they'd be coming back for you with any less than a full army, and they're a little shorthanded across Midguard right now."

I glare. "Was that a joke? A really, really dark joke?" I ask. Thor shrugs.

I grunt. "Well, I knew there was something about you I liked." I take the pill, knock it back with a slug of juice: the risk of vivisection is still somehow less scary to me than those dreams and besides, when Thor says he'll look out for me I…. Shoot, I kind of believe it. I don't _trust him_ trust him, but I don't think he's the kind to steal kidneys. He seems an okay guy.

Which make me feel pretty bad about by plan to rob him., I guess.

Anyhow… I wonder how long these tranquilises take to kick i- 

* * *

I do not dream. It's a godsend.

No, I literally mean that: Thor keeps sending out for more of those pills and telling people he's a god if they try to argue with him, and for about two days give-or-take all I do is sleep, drink juice, and piss. Stars! I'd forgotten just how exhausting mourning is. I'm groggy and confused, and really really sad all the time, but compared to before, this is custard. Not dreaming is the best. Not that this time is without its problems: between the tranquilisers and the antibiotics, I'm a drugged up zombie at first, and I act correspondingly stupid. At one point Thor just finds me sitting on the can, leaning over forwards, head between my paws, crying. I'd been there for some time because he was napping, and I have a trail of snot hanging out of my nose so long it almost touches the ground. Charming, I know. The Snot- icicle had two roots, one for each nostril, but they merged in to one big transparent gooey stalactite after about an inch: completely transparent, like something sci-fi and body horror, and droplets were running down it to drip on the floor and I couldn't work out if they were tears, or more snot. I was so medicated I could remember that I was sad, but not why, and I kept loosing focus and then getting surprised by the HR Geiger booger because I kept forgetting it was there when I closed my eyes to cry and then getting startled because when I opened them again and, _whoa,_ what _is_ that thing?!

Thor cleaned me up, agreed to cut the dosage way, way back, and got me to blow my nose into some wadded up toilet paper, and he completely misjudged both the volume of my snout and the force of my blowing, so that was a brief giggle as his arm got slimed, but mostly I didn't even notice him. He… he just enabled me to exist, which was good. It is, and I will never admit it to him, remarkably comforting just to have the sounds of other people around when you're going through shit like this. Just something other than the sound of your own breathing, even if it is just someone snoring in the next bed. If I wasn't riddled with self-hatred and crippling anxiety, I might even have asked him for a hug, but thank the stars I was too doped up to think of that.

So, I get a couple of day's bed rest. Thor… Thor does all the stuff I need to do to survive but am currently too fucked up to do: He cleans up after me, changes bandages, reminds me to take pills, fetches juice, and makes sure I don't get Area 51'd in my sleep, and we slowly cut back the dosage bit by bit so I could function.

Not that this time is without it's minor disasters, like the milk incident.

The time comes for me to move on from juice and to gradually work up to real food. Thor has some S.H.E.I.L.D disaster relief-kits from Cap's Quin-jet, a smart move as fetching them gives him an excuse to check out where the jet is stored, and what it's security is like. Good plan. So he gets the kit, and he's using the calorie-dense quote unquote "easily digestible" rations from it to plan my first post-snap meal. We settle on a shake and some grapes flinched from the Wakandans. Haute cuisine, I know, but I need to start small. The shake, I'd like to point out, is a vitamin and mineral fortified, protein enriched, super-high calorie canned milkshake: comes in three flavours, only one of which, the chocolate, will kill me. The Vanilla and Strawberry, as it turns out, will only make me wish I were dead. See, because the way we picked this involved Thor asking me if I was okay with milk.

Sure I say. Milk, why not? Blue stuff, fresh form the moisture farm. I mean, what going go wrong, right?

After all, it's only liquefied hyper-soya…

Fast forward half a day: I'm on the can, Clutching my gut and wishing for death, while shouting at Thor, who is sensibly hiding on the other side of the bathroom door.

"You said Milk! You _utter_ bastard!"

"It _was_ milk Rabbit! You never warned me you were highly lactose intolerant!"

"I'm intolerant to idiots! I'm an _adult:_ what sort of ass-backwards mammal species retains lactose tolerance into adulthood! I thought you meant syth-milk! The blue stuff made on sweet little moisture farms out of soy and algae and, not…. oh god, what _was_ that shit?!" I yell, groaning and clutching my stomach. It's a pity I've changed my name from Rocket, I think, because I just about manged to take off for a moment there if you catch my meaning. FML.

"It was Milk!" yells Thor. "You know… actual milk?"

" _Actual_ milk? You mean breastmilk? Oh god, what is wrong with this planet? You gave me Terran breastmilk, you sick fuck?"

"No not Terran… well okay, technically every animal here is technically Terran, but not _human_ breast milk, Rabbit, stop being disgusting!"

"Wait, _wait wait wait,_ you said that like humans drink other species' milk?"

"Well, in a lot of their cultures, yes."

"Holy shit! Terrans are going round drinking _other species'_ milk, and you're telling _me_ not to be disguising? What the fuck did I just drink?"

"Cow milk."

 _"Cow?!"_ I yell. Humans are 100% disgusting, it's confirmed. Take off and nuke the entire site from Orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

"Cow? The big angry mobile manure factories? You're telling me that human's first response to seeing a bunch of cows in the wild was to say to themselves _'Yeah, cow-titties: out of the way calves, I gotta get me some of that!_ ' Seriously? _Seriously?!_ "

"More or less."

I groan. Frickin' humie idiots, always finding new ways to ruin my life.

What's worse is I can hear Quill's ghost laughing his ass of at this, and now that he's dead I can't punch him in the dick for it. I wonder if Ouija boards work both ways, so I can tell him to fuck off just by moving a little plastic toy around. Then again, maybe he'd prefer divining the future in animal entrails, in which case now would be the time, Quill, because I'm pretty sure I'm about to fart out my spleen.

Once the universe-destroying volcanic eruption is over and I'm merely feeling sick, gassy, bloated and miserable, I flush, wash up, and open the door to glare at Thor some more. The good news is we've now confirmed that my digestive system still works: the bad news is between the lactose and the antibiotics I feel like I've been cleaned out with an apple-corer, giant pipe cleaners, and a fucking barbed-wire Christmas tree. Go me.

 _Why do books never include this bit?_ I think as I wash my paw and glare at myself in the mirror, fur all mussed up from tears. In films and shit like that, whenever someone's in mourning they always have them moping around in stylish black and staring wistfully into the sunset while composing frickin' poems about how they long for their spirt to go out and touch their loss and yada yada yada, some crap like that. You never see the bit were someone is so fucked up by grief they forget to blow their own nose, do you? I run the taps. When the grief is so bad they get legitimately sick of it, in messy, non-Hollywood ways? I clean my face. Where they can't get out of bed, they stop bathing, and need to have a friend waiting on the other side of the bathroom door while they cry and poop at the same time? The bit were loss like this is, surprise surprise, _hard fucking work?_ I mean, I guess it wouldn't sell as many movie tickets as the poems, because not everyone's a sick fuck like me, but still, I feel like I'm being singled out here: I just lost my son, and there's _still_ some unrealistic standard of aesthetics I'm taught to aspire to? No. Fuck that, I think drying off and straitening my face-fur as best I can. I want to get well enough to get my revenge, doing it _prettily_ can go fuck itself.

Which is just as well, I think looking at my reflection. I ain't exactly an oil-painting at the best of times, but right now I'm verging into pointillist. I.E., you'd need to be standing a good long way away from me to say that I look good right about now. I sigh, scowl, and get back to work.

Thor looks on sympathetically as I hold one paw to the bathroom door and one to my protesting guts.

"Are you okay Rabbit?"

"Peachy: I always wanted to know if my body could make the exact same set of noises as a disintegrating jet engine: pebble-dashing the toilet bowl was just an added bonus. And what's with the waded paper? Is that really what they wipe themselves with on this planet? It's _dis-gust-ing_. That's barely one step up from a handful of leaves! What happed to ultrasonic water jet bidets, or those three seashells?" I ask, pushing through into the main room of the suite. I do not bother to close the bathroom door behind me: given the situation I do not think I should be putting more obstacles between myself and the can the needs be until we've worked out exactly what I can and cannot eat on this stupid little planet.

Thor shrugs. "I always found their plumbing adequate, certainly compare to the tenth century: you should have seen them then Rabbit. I mean the smell alone… This is an improvement, trust me, although somewhat overcomplicated compared to Asgardian privies."

"Why, what do you guys do?" I ask. Thor just shrugs again.

"Just use the Bifrost to open a portal to a random set of co-ordinates in space time, and build a seat over it."

"Wow: remind me never to piss off an Asgardian plumber." I mutter, staggering into the suite and making it as far as the coffee table: there's a pillow laid out either side of it so Thor and I can sit opposite each other and he can glare at me while I eat, tell me I'm not eating enough, and make veiled threats about force feeding while I spit an glower and try to choke down solids on a stomach that has forgotten what they feel like. The grapes are still there on the table, as is the ever-present orange-juice. I scowl, but I sit down and eat because I know if I don't I'll be forced to. Thor sits opposite, cross-legged, like we're at a little girls tea-party and I'm the world ugliest teddy bear.

 _Second ugliest_ , I think, glancing over at him. "Schematics?" I ask, pulling over the water-bowl so I can dunk each grape in turn and check then over with my paws before eating them. Thor casually plucks a grape and tosses it his mouth without even glancing at it, because he's a crazy person with no standards.

He hands me a Shield-Issue data-slate, and boots it up, projecting the schematics of the quin-jet hanger over the table. It's at the absolute top of Panther Tower, in the secure Royal Compound. Not good. The on-site guards are just a pair of kings-guard, but the alarms and electronic countermeasures mean that one false move and the Border Tribe delegation and Dora-milage will be paying us a visit in seconds because their barracks are in the same goddam tower. Better and better. Oh; and the tower is on total lock down, apparently, Thor only being allowed to go up to fetch stuff from the jet with a dozen armed guards riding the elevator with him, no stops, and not even permitted to look in any other room of the building.

I grunt, and pick a grape seed out of my teeth. "Not good" I say, flicking it at Thor. "What're they so paranoid about? Surely the worst that could happen _just happened._ What are they concerned about now, aggressive Door to Door leafleting?"

"No…" he flinches, as I get him in the face. "No idea Rabbit." He says picking the seed out of his beard and glaring. "The official line is that the royal family is in mourning after the death of Ta'chala and not to be disturbed, but Corvus Glave smashed up the lab there when he attacked Vision, so it's possible they need to contain a breached high-security area before they'll let anyone in the tower and- stop that!"

"I asked for seedless grapes, this is what you get, dummy." I retort. I, cautiously, move onto the can of roasted nuts Thor salvaged from the minibar. Macadamia… pretty good but no Zarg nut. I glare at him as I crunch. "and Banner?"

"I've asked him if he'd consider putting together something for me, a gamma detector. He's said yes in theory, but he wants to know why, and I haven't told him yet. We'll also need parts."

I nod. "I made a list." I say, passing him my data slate. He glances over it, and his brow furrows.

"What?" I ask. "Words to long for you?"

He doesn't rise to the taunt, but just sighs as he runs own the list. "Banner may have some of these items, some of the rest we may be able to salvage from the destroyed Hulkbuster suit, but the rest…" he lets the sentence hang, like a noose.

"We can't get the parts?" I ask, horrified. "Don't tell me these hicks don't have the tech! I've seen adverts on Quill's old TV intercepts: the fuckers have spray on cheese, for fucks sakes, don't tell me they wasted their time inventing spray on cheese when they could have bin' making binary couplings and room temperature superconductors! What's wrong with these primitive chuckelfucks?!"

"Oh it gets worse, Rabbit. Two words: _selfi-stick._ Most of them don't even have a basic understanding of quantum entanglement, but they have a device to capture an image of yourself from _slightly_ farther away so it's more flattering. No… it's not that they don't have the tech…. It's far far worse than that: it's that they _might_ have the tech, but we'll only find out at the last minute."

"Why?" I ask.

Thor nods to the projected image of Panther tower, hanging over the table. "Remember what I said about how they're probably scrambling to secure Shuri's lab…"

I groan. "So the stuff we need may, or may not be, in the most heavily guarded part of the royal compound… and the second we snatch it," I say with a dread sense of Deja-vu "the entire place is going to go into lock down, so we definitely need to get that _last_."

"Or we could get it first and improvise." Says Thor, eating grapes with a mock jovialness I instantly hate.

"Well, thanks for that. Oh boy…. Okay, let's start planning our heist them and get Banner up to speed on what we need from him... can we trust him not to snitch?"

"Ummm, probably not: he is a bit of the class nerd. But you leave that to me, he owes me a couple of favours. You focus on getting well, and planning the build: you'll need to put together a gamma detector as soon as we have the parts, and some sort of weapon for yourself too. One not made from a toothbrush. Plan, rest, try to get back into something resembling fighting shape. Some exercise beyond looting the mini-bar would not go amiss."

"Yeah, I guess. If you can find food that won't _poison_ me, I guess some protein shakes and dumbbells would be a good start…"

"You realise you can't drink dumbbells, right?" Thor asks. I genuinely can't tell if he's being sarcastic or not, so I flip him the bird.

"ha ha, roid-rage. Okay, I've never been what you'd call _buff_ , but I wasn't always frickin' emaciated." I say glancing down at my own body. I hate it, but that's nothing new. The loose fur and fucking breadsticks where my arms used to be are, however. Metabolism as fat as mine, a week spent sick and not eating has melted way what little fat I once had like butter and seriously decreased my muscle mass: I can see the outline of bionics I wouldn't normally be able to. That's an issue. I grin, and sarcastically flex at Thor, showing off a bicep the approximate size and tone of the grape I'm eating.

"This way to the gun show." I say, sarcastically.

"Small arms fair, was it?" Thor replies, without missing a beat.

I grin. I'm really starting to like him, which is a pity considering I'm planning to rob him, but that's a problem for future Rabbit.

Thor stands. "I may as well get the parts I can, and speak to Banner. I'll be back in thirty or so. Is there anything you need?"

"Whiskey?" I ask, more in hope than expectation. Thor rolls his eyes, mutters some joke about me kindly refraining from burning the place down while he's out, and walks off towards the door. Well, good riddance. At last I can get some time alone to think and-

 _(Wooden hand reaching out, look of fear on his face, the axe that I can't lift, even to safe his life-)_

-and the flashback hits so hard and fast it nearly floors me. I shudder, close my eyes, and hiss. What the fuck _was_ that? There's a tightness in my chest that won't budge, and a chittering yowl building up. I force it down: I've got a _lot_ of practice at internalising my feelings because if I didn't everyone would think I'm even more of a psycho that they already do, but this s a new one. My body starts to shudder, and I have to grab my thigh under the table to stop my foot spasming. My paws sweat, and I have a hot flush and constricted, difficult breathing. I panic, and access save memory files looking up the symptoms, convince it's septic shock, or food poisoning or an allergy. What the fuck was in those grapes? That idiotic Asgardian has poisoned me for sure and-

It's a panic attack: the symptoms all line up, and my bionics internal diagnostic confirms it. A panic attack. I'm having a panic attack.

At the thought of being left alone, without Thor, for half an hour.

Well… fuck.

Thor notices, and turns in the doorway, despite the fact I'm successfully keeping myself from making any overt noise. How good are this fucker's senses? I'm not sure. Stars, I don't what him to leave, I realise. Everyone always _leaves_ me, and after Groot I'm not sure if I can take it again.

"Rabbit, Rabbit are you okay?" he says, hurrying over.

I think fast, and put a paw to my gut, and glare.

"No, trapped gas: I'm still worried I'm about to fart out a lung 'cause of these milk-drinking, lactose-loving savages." I say, my teeth rattling as I try to force the words out without screaming. "Can you grab me some anti-acids, and maybe some activated charcoal, and hurry back?" I ask, trying to keep the pleading out of my voice. "I'd take it as a kindness if you were back as soon as possible. Yanno, before I frickin explode."

 _Oh, great work you moron_ , I think to myself. Too insecure to say what the real problem is _and_ grossing him out with that metal image at the same time? Nice one.

Thor, however, is either so dumb he falls for it, or so smart he reads thought the lines because after staring at me shivering and shaking for a long moment he nods, tells me that he can be back in five if he rushes, and he asks me if I'm okay before he leaves the room fully.

I tell him that I am.

I'm not.

No sooner than the door is closed, than I'm on all fours hyperventilating and clawing at the carpet. I try to ride this out without screaming, and fail. Gods know what the Wakandan guards must think of this, but I hold the yell in long enough that at least Thor won't hear it. The scream, sooner or later, gives way to crying. I manage to pull a blanket from the bed, and wrap myself up in it to ride this out.

I'm planning two separate heists in Wakanda, to travel to Sakaar, of all freaking places, and to then rob Thor, an actual fucking god, when I get there.

And I can't handle being left alone for the half hour it will take my intended victim to get the stuff I need to pull of the first stage of my plan.

Well… I think, as I scream into my little racoon-cocoon on the floor and plot grand larceny, this should be _interesting_ to pull off _._


End file.
